just built a system for a customer

[traitun]

been reading some posts from people regarding win xp. i'm new to this forum and digidesign but i was admittedly pretty bummed after discovering that winxp and protools were not compatible.

i have a customer who asked me to make him a monster rig for protools. originally i was going to configure a dual cpu system, but after reading up on the compatibility issues with xp i realized that i would not be able to use the xp, win2k, or nt systems (OSes that support dual cpus). i was a bit shocked to discover this as everybody has already updated their software to work with at least windows 2000...

i set up a raid 0 config using two maxtor 60GB ata133 7200rpm hdds...in win98 though... gave the system 1024 megs of pc3000 DDR memory (though i wonder if win98 will even take advantage of the memory above 256)... amd xp 2100+.... hopefully, this can do the job...

any comments or recommendations?

[crs117]

Actually with that much memory in the system you will be lucky if you can get solitare to run in windows 98 or me. That much ram requires more Virtual addressing then the OS can handle so it wont function well at all.

I would take out 768 megs of ram till pt ships a version for xp. At that point 1 gig of ram is a lot still, but hey why not it wont hurt xp.

Christian

[traitun]

you must have never had over 256 megs of ram in win98

win98 is running fine. solitaire is working faster than i can possibly measure it.

performance is not an issue...i'm worried about incompatibility issues that people can warn me about to stay away from...

thanks.

[Shannon Dunn]

I run 512 ram in my W98SE system and it's just fine.

[Stone Knife]

traitun... you wrote:
i'm worried about incompatibility issues that people can warn me about to stay away from...
<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">crs117 is speaking solely to Pro Tools performance and the RAM issue, not other applications. And I agree with his suggestion; 512 MEGS seems to be the optimum for PT under 9x.
That IS an incompatiblity issue you asked for, answered! Perhaps one you weren't expecting or don't like, but true, nonetheless. images/icons/cool.gif

[Dreamware]

Let me address this problem. First of all you can have over 256MB of RAM. Anything over 512MB in Windwos 9x, it won't even load the OS. There is a tweak for this discussed in the Microsoft knowledge base. Realisticly anything over 512MB is useless.

[Mark_Knecht]

Alex,
Hi. This is an area where I'd like to get some real info. May people here talk about Win ME like it was nothing more than a repackaged 98SE subversion. However, I run 768MB on my GigaStudio box. It runs great, and there were sampler problems solved (high polyphony clicks & pops) when I went from 512MB to 768MB.

I've read the M$ papers about how 98SE slows down, but in my case I'm very happy I added the extra memory.

Do you know what's up with this?

Thanks,
Mark

Originally posted by Dreamware:
Let me address this problem. First of all you can have over 256MB of RAM. Anything over 512MB in Windwos 9x, it won't even load the OS. There is a tweak for this discussed in the Microsoft knowledge base. Realisticly anything over 512MB is useless.<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">

[Dreamware]

Well some programs like GigaSampler rely on lots of RAM so that is most likely why your problems were solved. The problem with Windows 98 and ME is that they don't handle memory mangement properly and when you close programs alot of times the memory does not get re-allocated properly causing leaks until you reboot windows.

[JPS]

Raid is not supported by Digi and generally not recommended. I have a GA7DX with raid for audio files and there is very little benefit. The down side is if you lose even a single drive, you will lose info on both drives. Before long I plan on converting my raid to normal ATA drives, but will leave them on the promise controller.

But even though using raid has little benefit, putting the drives on a promise controller does help and allows for more harddrivres with master settings. I have a second system with drives setup on the onboard promise controller as normal ATA drives and it works well. I recommend it.