Which XP ,Home edition or Professional?

PC Configurations, motherboards, etc, etc

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Signal X
Posts: 37
Joined: Fri Sep 28, 2001 4:00 pm
Location: ISRAEL

Post by Signal X »

Which XP good for Pulsar/Scope and audio enviroment? Home edition or Professional?
What recommended XP or 2000P rofessional.
dblbass
Posts: 139
Joined: Mon May 14, 2001 4:00 pm

Post by dblbass »

I've been looking into this for a couple of weeks myself. Haven't decided for sure whether to go to XP yet or not, but if I do, it'll be XP pro.

My reasoning: thoough pro seems to include a few extras that I don't need in a DAW box, it also has more options for user settings and customisation. (see optimising XP thread elsewhere).

I would judge the tradeoff thusly: The potential downside of having a lot of OS extras you DON'T need is HD space use on the install, RAM used on the OS at runtime, and diminished stability and speed owing to lots of extra DLL calls, threads, processes, and branch check during runtime. Upside is the above-mentioned enhanced settings ablity.

But these days HD/meg is super cheap, RAM is pretty cheap, and everything I read on XP so far seems favourable in terms of speed and stability. So I would judge the positives easily outweigh the potential negatives.

Of course, there's also the different in price. The pro is admittedly a few cakes more; everyone will have to weigh that in for themselves.

Perhaps someone with a few weeks actual experience on XP pro can let us know what additional user customising capability they've found in XPpro, and whether my armchair view is anywhere near accurate :smile:
marcuspocus
Posts: 2310
Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2001 4:00 pm
Location: Canada/France

Post by marcuspocus »

Hi, i work in XP pro for 2 weeks now. I found that it is most stable... But you got to tweak it alot, remove all the services that you don't need, remove decorations etc... Cuz i was having lots of asio overload. After tweaking, and setting PCI latency timer in bios from 32 to 64, it's performing very well. I got ULLI@4ms now, in my biggest projects had to put it a 7ms, cuz of some random pops & cracks...

Also, you should know, that in W2K or XP, wave drivers are at 16bits only, XTC work like sh*t, and directX is some kind of wrapper that play thru wave driver anyway...

If you have a Matrox Dualhead, the driver is ALOT better than in ME (better usage of dualhead capability like playing DVD fullscreen on the 2nd monitor like the Marvel G400).

I'd say, if you dn't have a mega-super-dooper-fast-as-flash-gordon-pc, you'd better keep WinME or Win98lite, or something like this. It's not as stable, but you can still get better performance. Save your work often!

I sure wish i had a P4-2ghz!



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<font color=yellow><b>Marcus Pocus</b>
The king is ALIVE!</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: marcuspocus on 2001-10-26 09:07 ]</font>
lifechanger
Posts: 89
Joined: Thu Mar 29, 2001 4:00 pm
Location: Chicago
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Post by lifechanger »

Marcus..
I've been real happy with my Matrox 450 dualhead on a weak lil Athlon 1.3, Biostar 761 (M1MIA)...I'm still only recording audio from my studio (see http://humangnome.com for pics).
I have a three computer LAN at home with ALL computers having Internet access all the time without latency or production problems...that is until this last week when I loaded some updated W2000 drivers which increased my screen resolution over 2,000X1,700, or whatever...now my track tweeking time has increased...I think I used to be at 860X...
So I may be a candidate for XL's drivers for dualhead, altho my current OS has operated beautifully with PulsarI/LunaII Sonar&SoundForge combination software on 2000Pro OS.
marcuspocus
Posts: 2310
Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2001 4:00 pm
Location: Canada/France

Post by marcuspocus »

On 2001-10-26 06:54, lifechanger wrote:
I've been real happy with my Matrox 450 dualhead on a weak lil Athlon 1.3, Biostar 761 (M1MIA)...

Well Athlon 1.3 + AMD chipset is not what i call weak!

On 2001-10-26 06:54, lifechanger wrote:
I have a three computer LAN at home with ALL computers having Internet access all the time without latency or production problems...

Exactly the same thing here, my DAW is even the ICS server with 2 network card, a hub + SCSI, and everything is fine!

On 2001-10-26 06:54, lifechanger wrote:
I think I used to be at 860X...
So I may be a candidate for XL's drivers for dualhead

I have 2 x 19" at 1600x1200x16bits, Luna2 + Pulsar1 with XLR in WinXP Pro, but what is this 'XL' driver?
____________
Marcus Pocus
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