Hello there...
Well, I´ve been very impresed by your experience of a none dobule booting systme Spirit. But now I´m not completely sure about this... As I add the office side of things, the machine is comming slowler and slowler... How do you achieve a single boot system to run speedy?
I´m not sure I want to keep it this way... I will probably come back to a double boot system as I used to have with Win 98.
Whom of you is using everything in a single side computer? Are you many? If you are using a single side computer, how do you tweak your machine to achieve maximum performance?
I want to be able to use as many samples as posible, I own a single Pulsar I Plus, so I have only 4 sharks for the moment and can´t afford to use many synth, so I do most of my work with samples.
Please, advice me as you think, thank you!
_________________
Music is the most Powerful Language in the world! *INDEED*
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: nestor on 2003-08-05 23:37 ]</font>
Double Boot or not Double Boot, this is the question... (Spi
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marcuspocus
- Posts: 2310
- Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2001 4:00 pm
- Location: Canada/France
Hi Nestor, i will not say bad thing this time... 
Ok, i use my computer with everything on it, it's my daw, development machine with bunch of java application and tools, my office machine, and my internet machine also.
The trick here i think is choosing your programs well.
For examle, NO WAY MS-Office will get anywhere near my PC, i've installed StarOffice(which i found alot more useable anyway). There is NO background process running from it.
Also, things like Realplayer are plagues. They install bunch of hidden stuff. No realplayer here.
With a carefull choice of software, there is no problems whatsoever created by installing stuff, as long as i keep them on c: drive, and not on my d: drive, were i record audio for example.
I think you shouldn't worry too much about this, but please, forget about ms-office! It's one of the worst program i know with realplayer!
Ok, i use my computer with everything on it, it's my daw, development machine with bunch of java application and tools, my office machine, and my internet machine also.
The trick here i think is choosing your programs well.
For examle, NO WAY MS-Office will get anywhere near my PC, i've installed StarOffice(which i found alot more useable anyway). There is NO background process running from it.
Also, things like Realplayer are plagues. They install bunch of hidden stuff. No realplayer here.
With a carefull choice of software, there is no problems whatsoever created by installing stuff, as long as i keep them on c: drive, and not on my d: drive, were i record audio for example.
I think you shouldn't worry too much about this, but please, forget about ms-office! It's one of the worst program i know with realplayer!
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Nestor
- Posts: 6676
- Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2001 4:00 pm
- Location: Fourth Dimension Paradise, Cloud Nine!
Don´t worry Marcus 
humour is ALYWAS well apreciated at my personla home, feel totaly free kidding with me, wenever you want, right?
Ok, I understand your point... No MS Office and no Realplayer... I knot you are a very experienced guy in computing matters and you are all day working with them... so you just know what you´re talking about.
I´m trying went for a single partition cos Spirit convince me about the fact that you don´t need to be up and down and up and down all the time, and this is true. I did reboots all the time with my before system, it could be a little tiresome sometimes.
I want to get the best posible performance, particularly when loading samples. I have 1GB of DDR 3200 Corsair RAM, and I know this is good enough, but many background little programs running at the same time, easily gets your RAM underwater... I´ve seen it.
My wife is going to use this computer eventually as well, so we need to put some office things into it. I have a few good office free packs, they are quite old, but very simple and this is all we need in this side of things.
That´s it, thanks for your advice.
humour is ALYWAS well apreciated at my personla home, feel totaly free kidding with me, wenever you want, right? Ok, I understand your point... No MS Office and no Realplayer... I knot you are a very experienced guy in computing matters and you are all day working with them... so you just know what you´re talking about.
I´m trying went for a single partition cos Spirit convince me about the fact that you don´t need to be up and down and up and down all the time, and this is true. I did reboots all the time with my before system, it could be a little tiresome sometimes.
I want to get the best posible performance, particularly when loading samples. I have 1GB of DDR 3200 Corsair RAM, and I know this is good enough, but many background little programs running at the same time, easily gets your RAM underwater... I´ve seen it.
My wife is going to use this computer eventually as well, so we need to put some office things into it. I have a few good office free packs, they are quite old, but very simple and this is all we need in this side of things.
That´s it, thanks for your advice.
If you are going to have more than one person using the machine then I would strongly recommend setting up dual boot!
If you don't like the re-booting bit between DAW and office, why not have a dual boot with both installations running pulsar anyway?
That way you can have one installation as an optimised DAW and use it as a backup.
Even though I have two physical PC's (one for DAW the other for general use) the DAW PC still has dual boot for backup purposes. The project files are on a shared drive along with the music data files. If one installation f**ksup, I can re-boot into the other partition and carry on as if nothing happened. This has saved me twice so far!
If you don't like the re-booting bit between DAW and office, why not have a dual boot with both installations running pulsar anyway?
That way you can have one installation as an optimised DAW and use it as a backup.
Even though I have two physical PC's (one for DAW the other for general use) the DAW PC still has dual boot for backup purposes. The project files are on a shared drive along with the music data files. If one installation f**ksup, I can re-boot into the other partition and carry on as if nothing happened. This has saved me twice so far!
Hi Nestor,
I suggested having a single boot because I understood that you wanted to get into multimedia - combining images, music, video etc
To successfully do that there's not much point in keeping music separate from image-editing applications and video editors. I considered doing that - I even thought about buying another computer so I would have one for music and one for image and video editing.
But even if money was not a problem, the concept was impractical Multimedia means images and audio. You need to be able to drop things in and out. And this isn't asking too much of a good PC !
For example, when I'm working on that stuff I'll often calculate that my music or spoken vocal track needs to run 103 seconds. I'll drop my 103 second track in then find that I need a longer intro, or maybe it should run for 105 seconds. If I had to reboot every time then it would agonising. Unworkable !
Sometimes I'll have six apps open (usually not for long as this is getting a bit extreme). But there might be Fireworks, a Flash-based app, Soundforge, and AcidPro. I have a 1Gb P4 1.8MHz AsusP4B dual-screen and it copes easily with this. I've had this machine for about a year now and had no major dramas - certainly no need to rebuild it or obvious corruptions. And that's despte the fact that I changed to PC mode *AFTER* installing everything !
It also runs Quicktime, the latest Mediaplayer, DirectX9 etc since I need all these things for multimedia.
I also added a dial-up connection for software authorisations, but no virus checkers
I believe the reason it's remained stable is that I haven't added any odd little utilities, no system-altering admin apps, no Windows updates, no MS patches etc
But like Marcus advises I don't have any Office applications or virus checkers / admin tools. Not even Word.
Along with this I also agree the key to a happy system is two things: once it's running OK *DON'T FIDDLE WITH IT* and second, *DON'T INSTALL CRAP*. Nothing gets on this machine until I've either demoed it elsewhere or know from forums etc that it's stable.
If you must load Office apps and do browsing on this machine too then be careful. Ghost it. The make sure when you've began work that your files are logically divided into folders which are individually small enought to burn to CD. With good backup you won't be nervous about things.
And if you've ghosted and backed-up why make a partition with a backup again ? I'm not against dual-boot - I've had very little experience with them. I've just found a single boot has worked fine.
I'm also interested in your slowdown. What exactly is now slow ? When did it happen ? And is slow enough to hurt your workflow, or just "slower than it used to be" ? As long as your machine keeps up with the speed you can work then it is running fast enough...
Will you increase the complexity of your system just to write a few business documents ? To me that seems odd. The more simple your set-up the less chance of failure.
But what happened to your old machine ? can't you keep that for writing simple documents and Web browsing ? Or even get a cheap, outdated machine for that ? A PC to web browse and write letters can easly be slow and old and still do that job fine.
It might end up being a much cheaper solution in the long term than having to waste time rebuilding or repairing your multimedia machine....
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Spirit on 2003-08-06 02:56 ]</font>
I suggested having a single boot because I understood that you wanted to get into multimedia - combining images, music, video etc
To successfully do that there's not much point in keeping music separate from image-editing applications and video editors. I considered doing that - I even thought about buying another computer so I would have one for music and one for image and video editing.
But even if money was not a problem, the concept was impractical Multimedia means images and audio. You need to be able to drop things in and out. And this isn't asking too much of a good PC !
For example, when I'm working on that stuff I'll often calculate that my music or spoken vocal track needs to run 103 seconds. I'll drop my 103 second track in then find that I need a longer intro, or maybe it should run for 105 seconds. If I had to reboot every time then it would agonising. Unworkable !
Sometimes I'll have six apps open (usually not for long as this is getting a bit extreme). But there might be Fireworks, a Flash-based app, Soundforge, and AcidPro. I have a 1Gb P4 1.8MHz AsusP4B dual-screen and it copes easily with this. I've had this machine for about a year now and had no major dramas - certainly no need to rebuild it or obvious corruptions. And that's despte the fact that I changed to PC mode *AFTER* installing everything !
It also runs Quicktime, the latest Mediaplayer, DirectX9 etc since I need all these things for multimedia.
I also added a dial-up connection for software authorisations, but no virus checkers
I believe the reason it's remained stable is that I haven't added any odd little utilities, no system-altering admin apps, no Windows updates, no MS patches etc
But like Marcus advises I don't have any Office applications or virus checkers / admin tools. Not even Word.
Along with this I also agree the key to a happy system is two things: once it's running OK *DON'T FIDDLE WITH IT* and second, *DON'T INSTALL CRAP*. Nothing gets on this machine until I've either demoed it elsewhere or know from forums etc that it's stable.
If you must load Office apps and do browsing on this machine too then be careful. Ghost it. The make sure when you've began work that your files are logically divided into folders which are individually small enought to burn to CD. With good backup you won't be nervous about things.
And if you've ghosted and backed-up why make a partition with a backup again ? I'm not against dual-boot - I've had very little experience with them. I've just found a single boot has worked fine.
I'm also interested in your slowdown. What exactly is now slow ? When did it happen ? And is slow enough to hurt your workflow, or just "slower than it used to be" ? As long as your machine keeps up with the speed you can work then it is running fast enough...
Will you increase the complexity of your system just to write a few business documents ? To me that seems odd. The more simple your set-up the less chance of failure.
But what happened to your old machine ? can't you keep that for writing simple documents and Web browsing ? Or even get a cheap, outdated machine for that ? A PC to web browse and write letters can easly be slow and old and still do that job fine.
It might end up being a much cheaper solution in the long term than having to waste time rebuilding or repairing your multimedia machine....
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Spirit on 2003-08-06 02:56 ]</font>
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Nestor
- Posts: 6676
- Joined: Tue Mar 27, 2001 4:00 pm
- Location: Fourth Dimension Paradise, Cloud Nine!
Well, you made me realize that I´m in fact being too exigent with it... Yes, it is slightly slowler now with SFP, Cubase,lots of VST Plugins,
Nero Burning Rom, lots of MSI Multimedia bundled software, FlashGet, WaveLab, quite a few DirectX Plugins, lots of free but good software
and plugins from Computer Music magazine, Internet Security, Antivirus, Graphycs and web app..., which is quite a lot in fact.
It´s slow to start and end, but that´s it, when I´m using it, I don´t even notice if there is much differece or not... sorry...
I guess that when you get a new system, by the biginning, you always want for it to be kind of special, you would like for it to be
more than what it actually is, a machine...
My old computer is off, due to BIOS, as you know, so I can´t use it for the moment, and I can´t afford buying a kilo of bananas today,
I´ve spend everything on this machine, and am at "ZERO", so no chances of getting even the most crapy of system for surfing...
Anyway Spirit, how do you surf if you work with Web applications all the time? Don´t you constantly need to be connected to the internet
to do your Multimedia job? I don´t see the point of having two machines one for surfing and the other for working... I had surfed a lot
with my Win 98SE system, and never hada a problem... just some email virus like most of us, but nothing else. What are you actually refering
too, is it to virus problems?
You sugested well Spirit, you´re right, I´m going to work in Multimedia, we are just learning with my wife, all about it... it´s not a simple
world, it takes lots of time. So yes, we are going to use this system as a DAW with Multimedia capabilities. As you said, having images and audio
toguether without booting it´s the point, otherwhise, I´ve had a rather good experience with BootMagic 1.1, even being a very old app.
The only time I had a problem with it, it was my fault, cos I accidently deleted an important file from it.
What do you mean by:
I also added a dial-up connection for software authorisations, but no virus checkers what does it mean?
I inted, as you, not to add any fancy thing like games, or little rubish applications... But... I DO need to have an office app, a absolutely need
Word, whichever it may be, cos I have a lot to right all the time.
Also, I have read many things related to XP optimazation, and some people swear about some tweak programs which do all the optimazations for you,
in simple steps. Are you using any of those optimazation programs or tweak programs? Is there a cheap option somewere there?
Cheers...
Nero Burning Rom, lots of MSI Multimedia bundled software, FlashGet, WaveLab, quite a few DirectX Plugins, lots of free but good software
and plugins from Computer Music magazine, Internet Security, Antivirus, Graphycs and web app..., which is quite a lot in fact.
It´s slow to start and end, but that´s it, when I´m using it, I don´t even notice if there is much differece or not... sorry...
I guess that when you get a new system, by the biginning, you always want for it to be kind of special, you would like for it to be
more than what it actually is, a machine...
My old computer is off, due to BIOS, as you know, so I can´t use it for the moment, and I can´t afford buying a kilo of bananas today,
I´ve spend everything on this machine, and am at "ZERO", so no chances of getting even the most crapy of system for surfing...
Anyway Spirit, how do you surf if you work with Web applications all the time? Don´t you constantly need to be connected to the internet
to do your Multimedia job? I don´t see the point of having two machines one for surfing and the other for working... I had surfed a lot
with my Win 98SE system, and never hada a problem... just some email virus like most of us, but nothing else. What are you actually refering
too, is it to virus problems?
You sugested well Spirit, you´re right, I´m going to work in Multimedia, we are just learning with my wife, all about it... it´s not a simple
world, it takes lots of time. So yes, we are going to use this system as a DAW with Multimedia capabilities. As you said, having images and audio
toguether without booting it´s the point, otherwhise, I´ve had a rather good experience with BootMagic 1.1, even being a very old app.
The only time I had a problem with it, it was my fault, cos I accidently deleted an important file from it.
What do you mean by:
I also added a dial-up connection for software authorisations, but no virus checkers what does it mean?
I inted, as you, not to add any fancy thing like games, or little rubish applications... But... I DO need to have an office app, a absolutely need
Word, whichever it may be, cos I have a lot to right all the time.
Also, I have read many things related to XP optimazation, and some people swear about some tweak programs which do all the optimazations for you,
in simple steps. Are you using any of those optimazation programs or tweak programs? Is there a cheap option somewere there?
Cheers...
*MUSIC* The most Powerful Language in the world! *INDEED*
My main machine doesn't need a web connection even though it makes multimedia designed for the web. The way it works is that I simply develop the "shows" on this machine, preview them in IE, then just transfer them to the web machine for upload.
This also has the advantage of running the shows on two different machines with different screen res and software versions etc.
The dial-up connection I mentioned is something which I fire up when I need to authorise apps. I dial-up, go to the registration page, then disconnect.
This also has the advantage of running the shows on two different machines with different screen res and software versions etc.
The dial-up connection I mentioned is something which I fire up when I need to authorise apps. I dial-up, go to the registration page, then disconnect.