How's Windows 7 these days?...Thinking of switching from OSX

[Hermanus]

ccleaner and Defraggler, the must have on windows.

[nebulae]

Is there a handy guide on how to tweak Win7 for audio yet? Linkage?

I answered my own question: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?&m=1862515&mpage=1

[nebulae]

Also, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - Black Viper's Win7 Tweaker Guide: http://www.blackviper.com/Windows_7/supertweaks.htm

[julienb]

these are just basic things to do with any system..

[Machinesworking]

Some of this annoyance is just due to my familiarity with Windows,

Eh, all of it is due to that.
I'm amazed at the "weirdness" of windows file structure to me when I use it, but that is never the reason I choose not to use it.
OTOH I think if you're comfortable with Windows use it. My personal experience has been that sometimes DAW wise I need to mix it up, or I start hating the limitations of a particular DAW, so I understand the logic of bouncing around.

My personal reason for sticking to OSX is simple, I know exactly how to fix every problem I get with it; in Windows I would have to be asking friends constantly.
Also the other two DAWs I own are OSX only.

[davepermen]

My personal reason for sticking to OSX is simple, I know exactly how to fix every problem I get with it; in Windows I would have to be asking friends constantly.
Also the other two DAWs I own are OSX only.

and this is why i stick to windows. for me, osx folder structure is weird, and i would have to ask people. when on stage and something goes wrong, you can't call friends (and it can happen, right before the gig). having the os you know best at this point is just logical. the os of choice, the apps of choice.

other than "knowing the os", both osx and win7 are perfectly capable of handling about any task without a big chance of errors (even macs can fail while on stage.. but the chance is low.. still, fallbacks are always welcome)

the interesting thing is that today, win7 really works well out of the box. i haven't tweaked anything of any of my systems. don't follow any of those tweaker guides, they're all based on knowledge from windows xp days (so up to 9 years old). the industry has evolved since then. and a lot of tweaks are based around myths that aren't really true. i worked with a team trough all sort of such lists and in the end mythbusted about any of them.

just use the os as is. tweak your AUDIO DRIVER if it allows (check the latencies and such). and tweak your usability if you want. but for stability and performance, don't touch the os. just as you wouldn't touch osx. both work perfectly out of the box. at least when you've done a clean install.

[nebulae]

these are just basic things to do with any system..

You're welcome.

[Faldoe]

these are just basic things to do with any system..

You're welcome.

It helped me out, thanks! Hopefully I can reconcile some of the issues I'm having with Ableton, if not, I may switch to Mac...There just so damn pricey...

[handojin]

now rocking 128 buffer in windows 7,,
not sure what i did to increase the performance as i did a bunch of things and either one or the combination of all made the little difference to get me glitch free operation at small buffer sizes..and with aero enabled!

some of the tweaks idid,,

rme- new driver v2992 doesnt need the "legacy mode" firewire so i changed back to normal driver

went over my running services again,, using blackvipers guide,, though i did this already but missed a few options,

updated drivers,, graphics card, intel chipset ect had some updates,,

installed ramdisk,, sacrificing 1gb ram to create ram disk which hosts my temp files, ableton temp folder and also live program, *deleted all the unnessesary files.

was using a custom built control surface created in usine,, clip grid, mixer, scene launching ect, pretty heavy background tasks and was taking lots of cycles,, reduced cpu priority on usine to "normal" and increased ableton's cpu priority to "realtime"

now im a very happy camper and will keep xp installed for another month,, or just incase,, if everything keeps running the way it does now the i can say bye to xp for good,,

im sure some of these tweaks did not much to improve things, maybe it was just the ram disk, or the process priority setting,, or the legacy firewire,, i really dont have time to test and want to mess around with a working setup but really happy with performance now,,

with the ram disk and windows temp files loaded to it, everything seems so much snappier in windows too,, opening programs are pretty much instantly, i dont think i notice the missing gb of ram either,, watching taskmanager when using live and practising my set i noticed there's always free ram,, much more than a gb so i dont mind the sacrifice for snappy response and such

[davepermen]

services tweaking in win7 doesn't do anything good anymore. they're virtualized and not running until needed anyways.

i bet it's the driver change you made, and nothing else.

[nebulae]

^nice tips!

[h4nc0]

ccleaner and Defraggler, the must have on windows.

Not for Win7. CCleaner is unnecessary and defragging is automatically done. Changing processor scheduling to "Background Services" is all you need to do in Win7.

[amigo]

Windows 7 has been rock solid for me. Both in the studio and playing live.

[spacecat]

win7 64 + live = approved.
=)