I am a hobbyist. I have a four year old PC (Quad Core Q6600) 4GB ram running Windows Vista and Sonar X1. I also use a UAD1 and a UAD2 card. My audio interface is a TC Electronic Konnekt 24D. I don't use the PC for anything but music.

Now, I seem to have pretty stable performance. Things aren't crashing or clicking. Low latency performance is a bit iffy but is not totally essential for me.

I don't really like Vista, and everyone says it is a bad OS and a resource hog. However, as I stated, things seem pretty stable.

So would you upgrade your OS if you were me? I don't want to buy a new computer.

No. Buy a new computer. Even for hobbyists, they're cheap.
And much cheaper than the can of worms you're thinking of opening.

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Success is round the corner. It's also round the bend.

Edited by tex (14/09/12 09:40 PM)

I'm going to ignore Tex's post for a minute as I just don't understand it. However...

Does your PC not do what you want it to?
Are you running out of resources regularly?

If the answer to the above is no and its stable and does everything you need it too - why change it?

If its no longer able to do what you want, and you do decide you want a new one, then win7 is the way to go, but choose carefully as most newer mobo's don't support pci natively which could cause problems with your UAD-1

There's not a lot to not understand Q6600 and W7 are mutually exclusive as it was optimised for use with i3/5/7 type computers or later.
I'd either stick with Vista or buy new. I'd wait for new until 2013 new year though to pick up some bargains.

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Success is round the corner. It's also round the bend.

Quote tex:

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Q6600 and W7 are mutually exclusive

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This is simply not true. There is absolutely no problem at all with running W7 on a Q6600.

Quote jamie_drum:

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I am a hobbyist. I have a four year old PC (Quad Core Q6600) 4GB ram running Windows Vista and Sonar X1. I also use a UAD1 and a UAD2 card. My audio interface is a TC Electronic Konnekt 24D. I don't use the PC for anything but music.

Now, I seem to have pretty stable performance. Things aren't crashing or clicking. Low latency performance is a bit iffy but is not totally essential for me.

I don't really like Vista, and everyone says it is a bad OS and a resource hog. However, as I stated, things seem pretty stable.

So would you upgrade your OS if you were me? I don't want to buy a new computer.

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I'm not quite sure of the quality of advice in this thread (sorry).

Basically upgrading to windows 7 possibly could make a very marginal difference in performance, but its insufficient to warrant the hours (days) of faffing to get everything working again.

If you get a new motherboard/chip then you should reinstall anyway so just wait until you have the funds to do it all at once.

Quote jamie_drum:

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I am a hobbyist. I have a four year old PC (Quad Core Q6600) 4GB ram running Windows Vista and Sonar X1. I also use a UAD1 and a UAD2 card. My audio interface is a TC Electronic Konnekt 24D. I don't use the PC for anything but music.

Now, I seem to have pretty stable performance. Things aren't crashing or clicking. Low latency performance is a bit iffy but is not totally essential for me.

I don't really like Vista, and everyone says it is a bad OS and a resource hog. However, as I stated, things seem pretty stable.

So would you upgrade your OS if you were me? I don't want to buy a new computer.

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I too would say stick with what you know, if it works, then what's the deal?

That being said, I was on XP and it was working a treat, I went up to Win7 as new software I was buying demanded it, though by way of experiment I imaged the XP drive, installed Win7 on another drive, then installed this 'Win7' on the XP drive too, and, it worked!

I do prefer Win7 now I have got used to it, just one niggle though, XP boots a lot quicker and yet all the hype said Win7 was faster, well it must be really really fast as in whatever way it is faster went straight by me so fast I never even noticed!

If you do trade up, and I think a Core 2 Quad is certainly adequate for most hobbyist scenarios, I would tend to buy a replacement hard drive, image the Vista drive then you can always go back to year zero so to speak

Before I do upgrade i go on the web and download all drivers, put them all in one place, I make a copy of the documents and settings folders, the VST folder etc, if you have a soft sampler, or indeed other types of software, copy the libraries. I use Cubase and I find copying the templates, export the MIDI Manager settings, the VST connections (for the interface) all this saves lots of time if building up from scratch

As far as I know, Win8 is Win7 with more touch screen functionality

The real issue with Windows upgrades is drivers. If all your hardware has Win7 drivers then certainly you could upgrade. But if everything is working for you, there is little to be gained.

The main advantages to upgrading to Windows 7 are - some software may require it and, you may get more complete security updates (I don't know the current support status of vista but as its two revs back now that Win8 is on the horizon, I would expect Microsoft would only be updating it when absolutely essential since - like you - people using it are doing so because they prize stability)

At the very least, if you decide to upgrade, put in a new disk drive and keep your existing disk so you can go back just by reinstalling your existing disk.

BTW, Win7 will work fine on a Q6600.

Quote tex:

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There's not a lot to not understand Q6600 and W7 are mutually exclusive as it was optimised for use with i3/5/7 type computers or later.

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Utter twoddle.
I ran a Q6600 with Win7 successfully for ages.

Anyway to re-iterate the point, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Another one on the "If it ain't broke..." pile.

I'll only resoftware if a hardware upgrade or software install forces me too otherwise it's just waste of time if the machine already does what you need it too.

As a side note to another post above regarding load times, I have a xp and win7 box running side by side and the XP one does indeed get to the login screen far, far faster but then it takes 3 times longer to get to a fully loaded desktop situation once you put your credentials in. The XP machine is running stripped down as a media center solution whilst the win7 box is my music install running all sorts of junk in the background (yeah, I know) so I'd certainly peg the Win7 install as having the faster load time overall.

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ScanProAudio Blog

Quote jamie_drum:

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So would you upgrade your OS if you were me? I don't want to buy a new computer.

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Maybe you could stick another drive in and set it up as dual-boot to see if you prefer it. Not difficult, and I think you'll decide to swap. Might also be a chance to try moving from 32bit to 64bit.

Quote BJG145:

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Quote jamie_drum:

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So would you upgrade your OS if you were me? I don't want to buy a new computer.

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Maybe you could stick another drive in and set it up as dual-boot to see if you prefer it. Not difficult, and I think you'll decide to swap. Might also be a chance to try moving from 32bit to 64bit.

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+1

I use a multi drive setup and I use one of the drives as a test bench. If any of the downloads, patches, updates, freeby VSTs pass muster, then I install them on the 'working' drive. That way it keeps the DAW free of any cludge and, surprise surprise, the PC hardly ever crashes. The slide in/out disk caddies cost about £7 each and I have 3, so on the 3rd I can even play about with LINUX

Definitely not.

Just deactivate the UAC and you'll be fine.

In your situation the UADs probably do all the work and the only reason to have a larger processor would be to use VERY large sample libraries (which would also require lots of RAM and a full 64bit setup - OS+DAW+instruments plugins)

There is no major difference on DAW performance between Vista and Win7.

I have the same setup myself (Q6600, 4GB RAM) but with Win7 and the only thing I lack is more spare time to produce/compose...

You've not said if you're running 32bit or 64bit. If it's 32 bit and your CPU is capable of running 64bit then a significant benefit will be the chance to install RAM over the 4Gb limit.

But if you do go for that route you should check for availability of 64bit drivers first.

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Don’t use apostrophes in plurals. It's not what they're for. Just add an S on its own!

You most likely would not gain much in the way of Sonar X1 performance improvement by moving from Vista to Win 7. But that's just my guess, and as they say, YMMV. Some serious mis-info going around. Best to do some reading elsewhere if you're up to it.

Seeing as you are using Sonar, you might find these links of interest:

http://blog.cakewalk.com/how-windows-7-will-effect-your-music-production/< /a>

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/obsessive-windows-7-under-the-hood-g uide-for-music-can-you-finally-dump-xp/#more-7680

As for the iffy latency, I'd venture that's just down to the Dice chip in your Konnect 24D and TC's drivers, and moving to Win 7 won't improve that (why I sadly gave up on my Konnect 24D despite its nice fx). But again, YMMV.

Now, at the risk of getting too technical, this MS page describes what was changed in Win7 audio-wise from Vista:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd756612%28v=vs.85 %29.aspx

And as regards Vista vs.7 performance differences which impact DAWs, it would appear MS intentionally reduced the performance of MMCSS in the Win 7 kernel compared to Vista (in the interest of power saving). See "Clock Rate" here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684247%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

See also "Upgrading from Vista" in that second link above (from the era of Sonar 8?), where the Cakewalk CTO mentioned that WASAPI audio in Win 7 had higher latency than in Vista (although things may have changed since then; dunno if the same related to ASIO also).

Anyway, hope all that may assist your arrival at an informed decision wrt Win 7.

Now, as for Win 8, still early days as they say, and the jury seems to be waiting (probably in a line in front of an Apple store)...

Check this for Sonar in Windows 8, they are very impressed!

http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a-benchmark-for-music-production-applications/

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Quote Shambolic Charm:

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Check this for Sonar in Windows 8, they are very impressed!

http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a-benchmark-for-music-production-applic ations/

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Yes, I was aware of that already. But "they" is Cakewalk, using their own internal benchmarking, so it is difficult for "us" to verify on our own.

Vin C. at DAWbench has just recently reintroduced Sonar in the updated cross-platform DAW DSP and VI benchmark tests available here:

http://dawbench.com/benchmarks.htm

so now "we" can diy.