"windows washing" optimizing the PC for Audio

Jacose wrote on 3/17/2002, 10:20 AM

In the latest issue of electronic musician, they had a cool article about optimizing your PC for Audio.... I went to the website ( http://www.emusician.com ) to try and link to the article, but That is The ONLY article they didnt have available online. weird.... but anyway, you could also go here: http://www.bluelifeaudio.com/~pcconfig/
one tip that Emusician had that stood out was that if you can make two different hardware profiles, one for casual use, with everything on, and one for audio, with everything disabled in the device manager except the bare bones setup for running the PC and rec/playback of audio, you can greatly improve performance. ( like disableing the modem, dvd rom, floppy drive, I forgot what other stuff I disables, but it ended up in a 10-15% performance increase with a big file playing.

Comments

Geoff_Wood wrote on 3/17/2002, 3:15 PM

Try http://www.tascam.com/support/faq/pc_optimize/index.php

SOund On SOund just had an article specifically on XP, but that won't be online for non-subscribers until the issue becomes dated.

wvg wrote on 3/17/2002, 3:45 PM

There's a simpler way. I discovered this shortly after purchasing Video Factory over a year ago when I was having a "speed test" comparing different processors with another poster. It turns out that simply rebooting PRIOR to doing any render will result in about a 10-15% performance gain. Just shutting down other applications did not result in the same gain. This was under WIN98SE. I'm now using XP, so don't know it the same gain would materalize. My guess is under WIN98 doing a forced restart results in freeing up all system resources. Since XP does things differently and applications run in their own memory space and the NTFS paging file is superior to the old swap file, there may be little or any gain. The method you mentioned saves RAM because a lot of drivers you won't need don't get loaded.