XP tip for Pro-Tools laptop w/Mimimum Requirements

[hubad]

Hi for people who bare have the minimum requirements to run Pro-tools. Any tweak for better performance is welcome. My computer is a Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.00 GHz.

I usually record to the internal drive and it gets the job done which is tracking my midi instruments. Anyways, here is a tweak if you want to get that last drop of performance out of your laptop or any computer for that matter. Im sure everyone has tried it at one time already.

Windows has setup a system controlled hiearchy which is notably called the Priority System. By increasing a programs priority, the task manager tells the system to pay more attention to it, by feeding it RAM and optimizing that program to use the system cache more effifiently. Lets explore into the wonderful world of priorities.

1.) Right click on your taskbar and select TASK MANAGER
2.) Under the Processes pane select a program that you would like sped up.
3.) Now right click, and under Set Priority, set the system priority to High.

That program will be much faster, and will run more efficiently. Beware, by setting it to Realtime requires a motherload of RAM (256MB a minimum). Note, the system priority won't always be high, it will only be high for the current session. Meaning, once you restart your computer, all your priorities will be set back to its default (most of the time normal).


To keep the above tweak:

This tweak will launch most executables with the priority setting you want it to have.

Let's say you have a game installed called HIGH NEEDS and the executable is called HN.exe

Here's what to do:

-Create a new textfile in the game-app wathever-directory (let's say C:\HN), but instead of giving it the .txt extension you name it HN.bat
-Right-click this file and choose 'Edit', you'll see it'll open notepad. Put this line in:
cmd /c start /High HN.exe
-Save (make sure you save it as .bat, not as .txt) and close.

Now create a shortcut to this file and place it on your desktop. Every time you doubleclick this shortcut HIGH NEEDS will open with priority set to 'high'. (ofcourse you can also create a batchfile on your desktop, containing the full path of the app you want to start but the nice thing of creating a shortcut is you can give it an icon).

These are all the settings: Realtime, High, AboveNormal, Normal, BelowNormal, Low.

*Realtime is not recommended unless you have a dual-CPU system!

bye