XP - gains and losses

[scardanelli]

OK, now that all the fuss is over, let's take a look at what we actually have. Well, I should say "I have" since this is a personal viewpoint.

So with XP I get:

8 extra audio tracks.
Direct Connect apps - soon.
Video support.
Marginally less performance.

I lose:

Digi Midi ports in other apps. Still waiting for some comments on this, and I'm not the only one. Cannot see them outside PT.

No MOTU 828 ADAT outs; Enabling these causes audio stuttering. Awaiting tech response from MOTU.

Sample Cell II PCI. Lovely low resource using onboard sampler. Digi not writing a driver for it - bear in mind if I'd bought this new from Digi it would have cost nearly a grand in UK pounds a few years ago. s'OK Digi, I'll just chuck it out.

Instability of XP - I have installed and tweaked as per instructions, yet it seems to fatally crash in odd siutations. OK let's be fair about this, we all know that OS's need a bit of tweaking to settle to pro-audio use, and probably there are people out there working on the optimum settings, but I've done the tweaks posted here and I'm still having problems. I'm certainly going to watch this space, and I do really appreciate the tech heads on this forum who continually solve these arcane problems. But I need to get on with my work....

All in all at the moment I've lost more than I've gained so I'm sticking with my rock solid 98SE, except for any to picture work, which I shall attempt in PT 5.3. Glad I did a dual boot system. And I'm certainly glad that Digi made the files backwardly compatible.

This isn't a rant, merely some observations now that the cheering has subsided. I suppose for those who've just bought a brand new PC and didn't want a dual boot with a near extinct OS then this really is a red letter day/week. But I suspect I'm not the only 98SE user on this forum who'll be treading very warily indeed before dumping SE. In fact my Sample Cell PCI may mean I'll keep a dual boot system for a long time, or until I get a second PC to run this "obsolete" equipment on.

Simon

[mattm]

oh, yeah - command focus mode for le...

[recordingguy]

Mattm...What are u talking about?

[Bloux]

He's Back!!!!!!!!!!!1

[marcusb]

Originally posted by scardanelli:
OK, now that all the fuss is over, let's take a look at what we actually have. Well, I should say "I have" since this is a personal viewpoint.

So with XP I get:

8 extra audio tracks.
Direct Connect apps - soon.
Video support.
Marginally less performance.

I lose:

Digi Midi ports in other apps. Still waiting for some comments on this, and I'm not the only one. Cannot see them outside PT.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">You need to install the Digi WaveDriver for third party MIDI support ... I responded to that about 3 days ago ..

Marcus

[crs117]

i would actually agree with you alex on this one. One of the greatest things about xp is that you dont have to be a computer dork to get it to work correctly. All these posts about how to tweak xp are at best ridiculous, and at worst insane. A couple of tweaks are good, such as turning off some of the gui enhancements that do nothing but make pretty graphics(shadows, show contents while dragging etc). The other really good tweak is to turn off auto play. Most of the other tweaks listed on this board will serve to make xp as buggy as win 98. If you turn off auto play, the graphical enhancements and go to ms config and turn off all startup apps then your machine should run wonderfully.

So yes i see pigs flying as alex and i agree on this one.

One thing a realized early in the beta is that acpi was created to make life easier for people. I turned it off to see if there where any performance hits, and there where none other then dealing with self assigning the irq's the old fashion way. Then i realized i couldnt turn it back on without a clean install. i reinstalled and left acpi on and everything was beautiful, and sharing irq 9 which doesnt seem to cause any problems.

Christian

[Lou Miller]

I also have to agree with tweaks making XP act irrationally. After making many of the tweaks in the optimization thread my system went down in flames. After clean installing XP again my system is running smooth as silk.

With 98se and Me(on the same exact system) I was never able to get digi an irq of its' own. Now it sits happily all by itself on irq 10. For me it's not about squeezing every last insert and send out of pro tools, but stability. Which was why I craved XP support.

I can see why people would be upset about not having support for their plug-ins. But personally when I think about the capability I have for the price of a decent microphone. I can't complain.

Lou

[Dreamware]

That is becasue all of the tweaks posted here are not good practice. Try the default XP settings to see how stable it is.

[smit1_uk]

Dreamware - I agree with you here, some of the tweaks posted seem to have got me into bother!
But I guess every PC is different. [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[Dreamware]

Alot of the tweaks are actually dangerous like turning off certain services that actaully do nothing or turning of ACPI which is not a good idea. XP is a state of the art OS designed to share IRQ's safely.