hi,

after having had enough problems last week, not being able to put new drivers for my audiophile 2496 card,

http://sound-on-sound2.infopop.net/2/OpenTopic?a=tpc&s=215094572&f=3510972 54&m=410105792

i ordered a new hd.(to eliminate influence of installs or uninstalls of programs on my music set up)

my pc is a celeron 1000 - 512 ram -with cubase sx 2 (never had problems ...)

1. Till now i used wind 2000. Should i buy xp or use 2k..... is it a rumour that xp will slow down my set up too much to be workable for sx ? (celeron 1000)...

2. Should i use the second hd only for wind sx and cubase sx (with a choise in booting up between hd 1 and 2)(with several partitions)
...or what is the most interesting (but simple)configuration here...
the guy from who i ordered the hd realy hates partitions ... so i have to convince him ...or i have to do it by myself (never installed xp nor used partition magic)

3. should i avoid going on the internet by configuring the hd (installing firewall,antivirus)

4. should i install nero on the second hd or is there a way of burning sx folders with nero installed on the first hd(office,photoshop,...)


best regards

XP is prettier, but needs more RAM and CPU. I can't see any good reason to upgrade, apart from some possible security improvements which are irrelevant if you update regularly. I have upgraded myself - I'm an upgradophile and couldn't resist it - but I have to confess it was a complete waste of money.

While it's rumored that XP might require a little bit more RAM, I fail to see this claim substantiated in practice (at least with regards to music production).

For instance, I have four PCs; two desktops, two laptops. The old desktop and laptop are PIII 700MHz and 600MHz, respectively, both with 384MB RAM. Both had Win2k, and were slooow to boot, and not exactly as Speedy Gonzales as they once were, compared to my new machines. To get to the point, I installed XP on these dinausaurs, and benefited from a youthful resurgence in performance of about 25-30%. Very noticeable, and appreciated.

Furthermore, by cutting down on extraneous services, and uninstalling software I wasn't likely to use on the Prod machines, I got XP to run on only 88MB RAM, a far cry from Win2k's 128MB+.

Therefore, unless you're running some legacy software that is unlikely to be upgraded, and you don't want to compromise the rock-solid performance you've achieved thus far, I would highly recommend that you upgrade to XP.

Word of caution, however: XP has some issues (some of which I'm currently wrestling with at the moment), which have been creeping up as Hotfixes have been patched on the windows code. In light of this, I would recommend installing your Mx Prod machine with the original XP disc, pre-sp1 if available (unless you are going to surf the net with your Prod wks) and certainly without sp2 (wait a few months to see what others have tried and suffered the benefits to be, potentially, to you).

"To get to the point, I installed XP on these dinausaurs, and benefited from a youthful resurgence in performance of about 25-30%. Very noticeable, and appreciated." Axe L

Really?? That's interesting.

I've got a confession to make here. I'm currently running on Win ME (don't panic - I'm due to return to XP). My pc came pre-installed with XP Home ed. Nothing I had would run on it at the time (even some chill-out games). Mainly, I was generating midi backing tracks to Cubase via a Korg 'PC to Host' connection and in XP this doesn't work (a later found fix was to cut one of the leads in the cable). So, in frustration at the time, I re-formatted with ME. Everything worked fine on that. But, of course, nothing I need to upgrade to now (aka DAW etc) will even take a sniff at ME.

Seems we're all that the mercy of Bill Gates, although I did read an article in the PC Extreme mag that featured GNU/Linux and the SUSE as an alternative OS. But I need to re-read it a few more times to get my head around it.

XP's nicer and it's got a future. 2000's still a great system though. It's not a rush... It's one of those upgrades to make when you've got the time and cash {or when you want to run something that requires it.}

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www.RTaylor-Design.Com

Edited by The Living Exile (07/09/04 01:00 AM)

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To get to the point, I installed XP on these dinausaurs, and benefited from a youthful resurgence in performance of about 25-30%. Very noticeable, and appreciated.

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I'm guessing that you'd get this kind of improvement simply by formatting your OS partition and reinstalling Win 2k - it's generally good practise to do this every once in a while anyway. There ain't much difference between 2k and XP, but support for 2k seems to be waning, for example Windows Media Player 10, so itmay be best to get the upgrade pain over and done with early.

You have sufficient RAM to run XP without any problem. To work with audio altought it is advisable to tune up XP a little bit (namely turning off the cpu consuming GUI pretty interface and going for a more standard windows design), something you also must do for 2k. Take a look at http://www.pcmus.com/TweakXP.htm for some good advice.

I don't understand the debate concerning XP vs 2k because in fact, Windows XP is Windows 2000 updated. They share the same evolution path (Windows NT -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP) but XP have the a more polished kernel for everything which is real time media related. In fact Windows XP was to be named Windows 2002 (or something like that) before MS decided to go marketing and name it completely different. The fact of MS considering Windows XP as a multimedia platform (a thing which 2000 never has been, it was more than everything else a business platform) have gave us the collateral benefit of improved media caracteristics.

Regards

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Luis Mota

hi,
thanx for the response ...
I already have the new hd and the supplier advised me to use the 2 hard disks separately by making a choise of "auto" or "none" in the bios when booting up ...(choosing just one hd at a time...one for office ...one for music)... this is the only way of taken no risks in having viruses or have trebble with office programs or internet ....

Not so practcical i guess ... but is he having a point ???
Other or even better but secure possibilities ?

best regards

Don't forget that Cubase SX 3 only runs on XP. Are you planning on upgrading?

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Infekted.org - home of the NEW unofficial Access Virus forum

Quote:

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Quote:

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To get to the point, I installed XP on these dinausaurs, and benefited from a youthful resurgence in performance of about 25-30%. Very noticeable, and appreciated.

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I'm guessing that you'd get this kind of improvement simply by formatting your OS partition and reinstalling Win 2k

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Nah, Phil_UK - I had actually bought a new 30GB HD for my jurassic Dell Inspiron 7500, and re-installed win2k on the new drive. Indeed there is always a performance improvement, but that's short lived. Once you re-install Acrobat, Office, Premiere, Norton or avast, and the myriad of utils, anti-spyware or otherwise, that make life bearable on Windows, the sluggishness comes back. And I defrag all my partitions at least once a week.

So I stand by my statement: installing XP on an older machine does allow it to catch a second breath. How much of a breath certainly depends on whether your drive is close to capacity, and how much RAM you've got there, but I noticed the improvement I mentioned even before I added 128MB to my existing 256MB, which has been plenty, for that machine.

Try it