Optimize Your Windows 2000/XP PC For Audio

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Fri Jul 12, 2002 2:13 am

Disable CD AutoRun under Win2k/XP:
Run 'regedit', go to:
Local Machine/system/controlset001/services/cdrom/

choose Autorun value, set to '0' instead of '1'.

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Jul 16, 2002 11:20 am

at0mic: TweakUI XP also has this option built in, which you can grab over at download.com ... all within a comfortable interface.

Also, one other thing I really like to use on my XP boxes, is something called XP AntiSpy which disables various items that XP sends over the net - get it over at http://www.xp-antispy.de - click on downloads.

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Tue Aug 06, 2002 6:24 am

If you have a network connection, go to your Connection's properties. For "Connection uses the following items" you can uninstall everything but the TCP/IP protocol.
This also goes for older Win versions.

mythalethe · Post by **mythalethe** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 1:43 am

On 2002-02-17 01:40, at0mic wrote:
-Actually you could just make 2 hardware profiles, and de-activate all Services (edit:) and Hardware Devices that are not used in your DAW.
-You cannot put 2 OS'es on one partition.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: atomic on 2002-02-17 15:21 ]</font>

Atomic,

Is it possible to associate seperate hardware profiles with different user profiles? This might make it easier to switch back and forth...

-Myth

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Sat Aug 10, 2002 2:55 am

It's not possible to change hardware profile by logging in under different user. You must reboot. Unless someone comes up w a script or so, but I'm not experienced w that.
So, AFAIK, you cannot.

pwhitmaker · Post by **pwhitmaker** » Fri Aug 16, 2002 2:51 am

When I got my new Dell Computer 2 month ago with WinXP, RDRAM, 1,7GHZ and everything I thought: Wow, now im going to be able to do evrything on this computer.
When I had installed Microsoft Office and a bunch of other software I use, I installed Pulsar2 and Logic 5.13 and then started to make music. What happens?: Crackles and noises all the time in my songs. I thought: What is this? A new fast computer and its worse than my old one??
I started to search the web for all kinds of WinXP tweaks to improve the sound but it still was the same crackles after all tweaks.
I upgraded the RDRAM from 256MB to 512MB, it helped a little but still crackles.
I started to think about my old 1Ghz computer. There I had dual boot with a special Win98SE for only music. No internet, no games, no Office only musicsoftware.
So yesterday evening I Installed a second WINXP on my new computer. Totally clean partition without games, office, internet and everything. And what happens? It still crackles!! No, Just kidding ;O)

IT WAS PERFECT!!! No crackles at all.
So though its a much faster computer in everyway its still like old Win98, NO GAMES, NO OFFICE, NO INTERNET, nothing except music software if you wants to make music with the computer.
By the way its very easy to do dual boot with XP. Its just to install the second XP on a separate partition on the disk (or a new disk ofcourse) and then install all the musicsoftware on this partition.

Peter

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Sun Sep 15, 2002 1:21 pm

Here's SP1 for different languages. Today there's 3: English, German and French. More will become available when they're ready.

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Sat Nov 30, 2002 9:07 pm

Finally I found some official statement supporting ACPI, here's what Steinberg Support Knowledge says:

"Most of the current Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon XP mainboards have this API controller providing the system with 24 instead of 16 interrupts.
If this applies to your system (check the mainboard documentation) you should leave XP to install ACPI, this is done automatically."

And Ingo from Creamware on the yahoo group:

With Windows XP and a board that supports APIC, enabling ACPI might work
great. The cards will be distributed to the 24 or more IRQs normally without
IRQ sharing

Key is, to check if your motherboard has APIC. You then have 24 real IRQ's and ACPI will not share them.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: at0mic on 2002-12-04 17:12 ]</font>

valis · Post by **valis** » Sun Dec 01, 2002 12:36 pm

Incidentally I do happen to have MS Office, a game or two, Photoshop, Illustrator, and my 3d software installed in the same instance of WinXP as all my music apps.

MS Office (& Works) have several things running in the background, the worst of which is a file indexing service which is CONSTANTLY monitoring all file accesses and even scans your harddrives during periods of (what it thinks are) low activity. I have managed to KILL the file indexing service and find the other memory resident bits of Office & disable them.

In addition to flat out KILLING the indexing service it's also a good idea to remove XP's own version of this, turn off NTFS's more intrusive features (like updating last accessed dates on all files everytime a dir is traversed) etc.

The only 2 things I have to tweak related to my gfxapps are disabling photoshop's gamma loader (loads at boot) and having the FlexLM license server which runs as a service (and the renderer's own service as well) set to manual.

In the old days games took it upon themselves to install 'their' version of directx causing a lot of problems, but this is not longer the case, tho in most cases it's still probably better to have a dedicated boot (if not machine) for gaming.

Of course this was a lot of work, it's definately easier to simply install another instance of XP if you must have a single machine pulling multiple duties. Having run NT since 3.51 (as well as macs, sgi's etc) I'm used to tweaking the system to my liking though....

Zer · Post by **Zer** » Fri Dec 20, 2002 11:03 am

In order to achieve lowest possible latency settings without ticks & crackling, you might want to try to give 'background tasks' CPU-priority over 'applications'. In Windows XP/2000 you can go to CONTROL PANEL, SYSTEM, ADVANCED, PERFORMANCE, SETTINGS, ADVANCED. Here say that you want 'background services' to have priority for CPU usage.

ds-sound · Post by **ds-sound** » Wed Dec 25, 2002 9:30 pm

I've translated the entire XP tweaking info to HEBREW, I hope this will be useful for my fellow pulsar owners in Israel.

Please note this file was written several months ago, so after following its content it'll be wise to read the most updated tweaking tricks and tips published here...

Is there a way to link that file to this message? I see no 'attach' buttons anywhere...

valis · Post by **valis** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 7:48 am

I'd suggest putting them here:
http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewforum ... rum=13&165

and then add the url to the post in here by pasting it into a post

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Wed Jan 15, 2003 5:45 am

Another very comprehensive site about XP Tweaks, specifically for Cubase and Logic:

http://www.synsongs.de/tweaks.htm

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Tue Jan 21, 2003 9:52 am

On 2002-12-01 12:36, valis wrote:
MS Office (& Works) have several things running in the background, the worst of which is a file indexing service which is CONSTANTLY monitoring all file accesses and even scans your harddrives during periods of (what it thinks are) low activity. I have managed to KILL the file indexing service and find the other memory resident bits of Office & disable them.

Would you mind explaining the steps to achieve this? I'm also running Office/Word so anything that saves me performance would be welcome. (although I don't really have any problems so far).

s1m0nE · Post by **s1m0nE** » Sun Feb 16, 2003 12:38 pm

acpi............i switched back to standard pc simply because in cubase sx i was getting too much latency when midi recording, and the notes came in twice.anyone know a way round that i'd gladly get into an acpi set up with apic swithced on and 24 irq's givin it the large - i mean, this is supposed to be progress isn't it? how come with a brand new advanced capability motherboard i have to switch all the new stuff off?

valis · Post by **valis** » Thu Feb 20, 2003 6:49 am

On 2003-01-21 09:52, King of Snake wrote:
Would you mind explaining the steps to achieve this? I'm also running Office/Word so anything that saves me performance would be welcome. (although I don't really have any problems so far).

Findfast is the old name under NT as part of Microsoft Office. Now it has been redubbed the "Indexing Service". It is enabled by default for Windows 2000 and XP as part of the base installation and unless you have a special need for a full text index of all local files, I recommend disabling it.
Control Panel >
Add / Remove Programs
Add / Remove Windows Components
Uncheck the Indexing Service
or simply change the Indexing Service from Automatic to Manual in the Services manager console (mmc.exe).

If you're on an older OS check msconfig for Fastfind

heisenb · Post by **heisenb** » Mon May 12, 2003 5:33 pm

hello braincell, I would need those NT drivers for the opcode 64x if you can help. Thanks.
zenblue@libero.it

On 2001-09-28 14:56, braincell wrote:
Thanks a lot subhuman. I'm going to give this a try. I found a beta nt driver for my ancient opcode studio 64x midi interface. I hope standard mode supports scsi because I don't see my scsi raid listed and usually windows installs a generic driver when I do a clean install. So many drivers so little time...

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 12:19 am

225 links to Windows XP Web Sites to learn almost everything about it!

Here you have the first 24 of them…

http://www.5meg.org/resources/portal.php

http://pcgroup.nwark.com/xp6way32.htm

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20011115S0014

http://www.emulators.com/xptutor.htm

http://www.2000trainers.com/section.asp ... b=articles

http://www.activewin.com/faq/whistler.shtml

http://www.geocities.com/xpmp9/

http://www.annoyances.org/

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100529/WinXp/

http://www.arstechnica.com/tweak/win2k/ ... ons-1.html

http://www.avgjoegeek.com/guide/winxp_tweaks.shtml

http://www.belchfire.net/

http://www.beemerworld.com/tips/servicesxp.htm

http://www.billssite.com/xpfaq.htm

http://winxp.bink.nu/

http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm

http://www.bootstrike.com/WinXP/

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/xpinstall

http://xp.newstrove.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home ... _FAT32.asp

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwb ... board.html

http://www.tweaknow.com/netopt.html

http://www.petri.co.il/tips_and_tricks.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... bContent=1

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Tue Jul 15, 2003 9:45 pm

Here you have some more...

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Oper ... indows_XP/

http://www.viewz.com/computingtips/computingtip76.shtml

http://computers.douglasthrift.net/winxpfaq/

http://www.dougknox.com/

http://www.dummies.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-100085.html

http://www.dzfx.com/workshops/list/2/Windows_XP_Tips/

http://www.theeldergeek.com/

http://www.emulators.com/xptutor.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... bContent=1

http://www.mvps.org/ecvogel/

http://www.vnunet.com/Features/1126848

http://www.ezwinxp.com/

http://www.subvers.com/technobabble/html/tweaking.htm

Omb · Post by **Omb** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 5:13 pm

hello everyone.
i have try dozens of twiks that are shown here and in other sites around the net on my new p4 2.4 512 ddr on asus p4pe .
i have dig and dig for days and months just to get the ultimate machine .
after a while i had a problem withmy pulsar and irq sharing so i decide to format my HD
and reinstall xp .
with the new XP i made very litlle changes
and basic tweeks because i wanted to make music again instead of tweeking all day and night and with this little chnges my system work even better then those days of tweeking.
my best advice is:
save your energy for the music unless you are a tweaking geek .

cheers
Omb