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19/08/2011 23:09
http://www.pc-music.com/content/tweaking-windows-vista-audio
box, click OK and restart. The next three tweaks are probably the most effective on general performance and are to do with stuff running in the background.
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Tweak 2 Clear the notification area and close the Windows Sidebar
You'd be amazed at what people have running on their systems and they often have no idea what they are or what they do. Have a look down at the clock in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. Any icons there? Each of those is taking up resources (processing power, head space). Some are vital and useful like your soundcards control panel but most are not needed and I suspect some are a mystery to you. This is called the Notification Area and each icon tells you that something is running. The majority of cases there's no need for these things to run constantly why do you need to be updated on your printers ink levels, or whether bluetooth is on or off when making music? These things can be found out manually when you need to know. The Windows Sidebar is mildly useful but ultimately stealing performance for doing very little. If you right-click the Sidebar icon by the clock and select Properties you can deselect Start Sidebar when Windows Starts or you can just close it for making music. So, go through each icon and find out what it is. Right-clicking usually brings up some options and you can often find a way of preventing it loading when Windows starts, or simply exiting them.
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Click on the Startup tab and you'll be able to see what naughty things are starting up. Be a bit careful as there maybe things here that you need to be running, such as Windows Operating System, the soundcards control panel, maybe your anti-virus, ADSL modem, but most things can be unticked and they can always be re-enabled. Click OK and restart the computer. On boot up you'll get a message saying that you have messed with the settings tick the box that says don't tell me again and click OK. Hopefully you'll notice how much cleaner and quicker your computer appears to be. Some people will tell you to disable various services but I feel that's very dependant on individual systems and how you use your computer and to be honest they don't make a load of difference. The next bunch of tweaks are to do with system settings from the Windows Control Panel, so click on Start -
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19/08/2011 23:09
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Tweak 6 Personalisation
There's a couple of things we can do here to maximise performance: Windows Colour and Appearance The Aero interface is nice to look at but for the sake of performance it has to go. Click on Open classic appearance properties and select Windows Standard. Have on last look around, sigh, and click OK. Screen Saver set to None. Sounds Select No Sounds and click OK
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19/08/2011 23:09
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Tweak 9 System
Remote Settings Untick Allow... System Protection Untick all drives except the C: drive Advanced system settings - there's a couple of important tweaks here: Performance Settings Visual Effects select Adjust for best performance. Then click Advanced and select Background Services. This is supposed to give priority to the ASIO drivers of audio interfaces and soundcards but no one really knows if it does any more. It used to be an issue many years ago and made a difference. Under Virtual Memory click on Change, much has been said about this and in the bad old days where you had bugger all memory it was a vital tweak on XP these days I would let the system manage it's own page file. There are complicated things you can do with placing the page file in its own partition on the fastest edge of a hard drive but i'm unconvinced it's worth the effort. Make sure you click OK to close these windows.
Tweak 10 Indexing
This is perhaps one of the cool Vista features in that it holds an index of files on the system to help it find things quicker. The idea being that you click on Start and type something and Vista finds it instantly. This is good but it does take over your hard drive from time to time you may hear it churning away when the computer is idle. If you turn it off it doesn't disable searching, it just takes a little longer. You can turn off indexing for each drive individually. Click on Start Computer Right-click each drive and select Properties and untick the Index this drive box at the bottom. Click Apply and it may take a few minutes to go through all the files and if it gets stuck on a file it can't change just click Ignore all. Those are your top ten standard Vista tweaks for optimising audio performance and they'll do the job nicely.
DPC Latency
There's one other cause of audio glitching and other drop-out problems and that's to do with badly written drivers and DPC latency. A DPC or Deferred Procedure Call is when something interrupts the processor to demand an important task is done and everything else is knocked to a lower priority. All sorts of system devices need to do this but badly written ones hang on to that interruption far longer than they should. The result could be that it breaks the real-time streaming of your audio and so you get glitches. There's a wonderful tool that can analyse your system and see if this is happening. It's one of the most useful troubleshooting tools ever and you can get it from here along with a bigger explanation: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
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Download it and run it and it will tell you exactly how well your system is behaving. If you get any spikes then open up the Device Manager and disable devices until the spikes go away. Be careful not to disable something that your system needs to function, like the hard drives, but other devices are fair game. I would disable things in this order: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Wireless network Regular network Modem Bluetooth or IR Optical Drive Microsoft battery management (if a laptop) Onboard audio drivers
If it has no effect then you can re-enable. Also disconnect any external devices such as drives, printers, cameras etc. It's often regarded as good practice to disable your network while making music. What you're aiming for is a lovely flat readout on the latency checker for at least a few minutes. It can be a bit bumpy and still work well, it's only when it hits the red that there's a real problem.
BIOS
Some things can only be disabled in the systems BIOS. This is the Basic In/Out System of the motherboard that is the heart of your computer. You can usually access it on boot up by pressing the Del or F2 key but have a look at your screen to if there's a mention of BIOS or Setup. It usually has a basic old fashioned blue interface where you use the arrow keys to move around. If you're not familiar with what you see then try not to change anything. If you are looking to disable an on-board device such as a modem, network socket or audio then you'll usually find it under Integrated Peripherals. You may also find an entry for Intel Speed-stepping or AMD Cool & Quiet which you should disable. Don't forget to save before you exit.
Summary
Vista, with the right approach, can work very well for audio and music making. More troublesome has been the lack of drivers and compatibility but this has improved greatly. XP still has the edge in performance but there's no reason to be scared of Vista. Personally I love it and I wouldn't go back. If you need further advice then please drop is a line. Login to post comments
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