[deanguidry]

Once one starts up his system with all hardware connected, the restart in diagnostic mode will have all the drives engaged necessary to run whatever you had in place when you started up in normal mode, and won't have anything extraneous....i.e. none of the little icons will appear in the bottom right on your taskbar. That's a layman's explanation. If you want a tweakhead's, maybe someone else will give us one.

My just recently upgraded system, is very stable...no crashes at all. I custom built with a Gigabyte 81945P mother board with 2 g ram, Pentium D 3.2 (dual core), running PT Le 7.0 digi 002r, and can record 32 tracks with IRL reverb on each. I didn't have time to max out the system, but system CPU was only at 1/2 with 128 buffer. I opened existing session with 27 tracks and 52 inserts including Izotope's Ozone3, 4 IRL Full reverbs, and numerous Waves RTAS plugins, including 4 wave GTR 2.0 plugins (bigtime cpu suckers), and was able to playback and record (4 simultaneous tracks) at 128 h/w buffer size with no hiccups at all. I rarely use D-verbs because the IRL verbs are so much better. At 64 there were burps.