PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Just saw this article:

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xm ... cwinxp.xml

in short, in EVERY test, windows XP ran slower than windows 2k.

Feels faster to me

XP feels faster than 2k for you? or the other way around? curious!

btw, at 969 posts, you have just got to be the most absurdly obsessed pulsar ubergeek on this forum! maybe i should set up a separate category, just for you

I mean with XP, so far I am impressed... I wouldn't say everyone should upgrade to it yet -- but I think in 6 months time, it will be almost the perfect OS. I'm using it at work exclusively for a few weeks now, and at home on a ME/XP dualboot.

I definitely like XP better than 2000 in many ways, but XP will need a good deal of tweaking to make it 'perfect.'

Items which bug the hell out of me on XP:
1. That silly dog. At least you can banish him away.
2. The default color scheme, but the Silver isn't too bad. I imagine many musicians will simply disable the eye-candy (there is an option to make it look like the old-grey-windows), however if I could keep the Silver scheme on, and not have it effect audio functions, that would be cool. More testing needed.
3. System Restore is on by default (as in ME), but there isn't a way to completely remove it (yet). I imagine many of those tests show XP as being slower, because of exactly this feature. I think it could be good, as I am not sure of the status of Norton Ghost on 2000/XP, so maybe if turned on/off wisely, System Restore could be useful. Definitely you want this turned off while recording or running benchmarks, for that matter
4. Although I like the fact that MSN Messenger is included (since I dispise AOL and AIM/ICQ), it is annoying that you if you don't like instant messangers, that you can't disable this feature and not have it try to connect still (when you disable it via the menus, it makes OE/IE load a few seconds slower since it must still try to connect). I have already seen some hack to remove this completely.

Overall, the most solid Microsoft OS ever, and it has a bunch of cool eye candy. It is self repairing (I replaced some DLL's manually to get certain apps to work, which was fine, until I reboot, and XP automatically removed the DLLs for me doh! hehe), stable, and nice looking. The differences between OSX and OSXP are smaller than any Mac vs. PC ever before...

Once there are more Creamware WAV drivers (if this is even possible), and 24-bit support, I can see this being the killer platform for most musicians. Until then, you might want to stick with what you're familiar with and already know how to tweak.

BTW, 30 posts from Pulsar Guru.

Oh yeah and the product activation isn't that big of a deal, if you don't change your motherboard often (which I usually do, but..) I have a real copy on my machine, and the activation was really easy. I chose not to register my information at Microsoft though.

There is also a Corporate version which doesn't require activation around, not sure where to buy it though.

Hi, cosidering all the facts, why not lend a mac from a friend and try MacOS X?
I'm on it right now and I can only say "I love it!" fast as hell

I agree with subhuman - once all graphics crap is turned off (the only thing I leave on is 'show windows while move') and you use decent hardware like a Matrox G400+ for video for example, the system is blazingly fast and reliable.. I haven't discovered anything evil at all yet. Services like system restore can be turned off. I'm *definitely* finding it faster than Windows 2000, and obviously in a different league to Win9x.

I suspect those benchmarks were done 'out of the box' - and its true with the fisher-price style graphics it is slow and can fuck with your audio. Thankfully all the shit can be turned off, and so far I'm finding XP, Pulsar3, and Logic 4.81 to be the greatest DAW I've ever used.

As for the activation, well um... I don't use the internet on my audio computer so I had to find a cunning way around it - it is possible - if you own the thing it is of course your own perogative to replace whatever 11 files you wish.. oops I've already said too much!

An even better link than the one John gives at the beginning of this thread, and what I am finding in my own experiences of using XP for about a month now:

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001 ... dex.x?pg=1

I am not saying everyone should run XP, in fact Logic users may be best advised to wait for 5.0, although there is one report in this thread of someone having good results with 4.81.

Concerning multi-tasking, I still think my old dual PIII-600 on NT4 was more stable compared the p4 2G on XP.. I really think it's true the NT based systems run much better with dual processors. Can't wait 'till there's a dual p4 2G solution. Not that I can afford one..
I mean, there's just no way a fast single processor can beat 2 processors at half the speed when it comes to multitasking.

But dual processors also don't give you twice the performance, or even 50% more performance over a single processor solution in nearly all tasks... making it a rather expensive solution for the performance gain. This will change once more audio is optimized for multi threads...