From Windows 7

[braincell]

I installed Windows 7 in VMware today and this is what I am using to type this.
Vmware lets you create virtual machines and install an OS or multiple ones on top of that. With the VMware player, you can take your OS with you to another computer complete with all software. Don't think about using it as a DAW because it won't even work well enough for stereo with the VMware audio driver, also no PCI or Firewire support. There is USB but I am sure it would not work well for audio.

Windows 7 seems pretty cool. Less clutter than Vista. The beta is available until the 24th. It will work until August. You need to reactivate it every 2 months or something like that.

[Neutron]

yeah i installed it on my non studio PC, (64 bit edition) i would be using it for everything except the daemon tools dont work and a few other minor things. i used dual boot though. i had to install it on a slower hard drive than my main raptor, but even so it seems quite good.

and it looks like you can resize partitions right from inside the drive manager, without acronis or pmagic! (but i was too chicken to beta test that feature )

[braincell]

Thar is why I used VMware. It's very safe.

[kensuguro]

how's the "extra" features you need to turn off? I guess for vista it was all the prefetch and indexing stuff, took me a while to figure out why the harddisk was going nuts.. Once I turned off all the "new and improved" stuff, vista started working well for me. I guess any os is fine as long as you know exactly which tweaks to do.. Just what for windows, it's always a bunch, and it takes lots of time to figure it out. (unless someone figures it out for you)

[braincell]

Maybe I am influenced by what I read before but Windows 7 just feels good. It seems cleaner and more simple yet the way the icons animate when you move them or move the curser over them is interesting to me. I turned of aero in Vista because I didn't like the 3D and glass look. The transparency was distracting. They got really into gradients in Windows 7 which is beautiful to me. I know this is a superficial part.

[valis]

Interactions between Aero, your graphics card driver & your audio software can be unpredictable. In theory Aero offers considerably lower cpu overhead due to shifting all the compositing to the graphics card, but some drivers are notorious for setting incredibly high PCI latency settings and hogging the system bus (nvidia, ati) and others actually use software layers to do much of the DX10 compositing (intel's crappy onboard) thus actually resulting in HIGHER cpu load for onboard graphics using Aero. So be ready to disable Aero or perform some system tuning (goes for Vista or Win7).

I've got the beta from Technet installed here (same build) and it does seem like it's a 'tuned' Vista. Using 64-bit atm and half of my audio software & drivers aren't supported (still) but otherwise seems ok. I'm more interested in how my graphics software performs in it, I still prefer Xp64 to Vista64 for large memory support & graphics work, Win7 seems to be better than Xp64 in many regards so far. I do have my RME drivers in place and everything seems fine there, but until I can run a large project for audio can't report much more there, especially as I'm still using Logic!

[next to nothing]

Neutron, Virtua clone drive is free and works with w7.

I've been testing it on my laptop (64bit) with 3dMax and it works wonders. Haven't tried any big demanding things yet, but responsiveness and rendering times seems good.

[valis]

One thing that bothers me with Vista & Win7 is the amount of drive thrashing that I see. I've got 8GB ram and tend to use it all when actually working in 64bits, which is probably part of the problem (Vista & Win7 have much more aggressive paging and want to have lots of spare ram available). Between that and the more aggressive power saving states in the newer SATA drives' firmware, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more issues than just from Seagate.

Some of the overhead comes from things like Superfetch, which is fairly easy to live without. But a lot of the other changes are permanent. For instance windows search (formerly drive indexing) is now so embedded into explorer & the start menu that even disabling the indexing doesn't remove all of the background processing it does, and all of the other 'productivity enhancements' like the thumbnail generation & caching (and other similar tasks) that occurs adds up. My usage patterns are not typical for a consumer or a dedicated audio machine, but for people who do more than 1 type of work on their computer and have lots of applications installed, having a backup volume lying around to backup your boot volume is a great idea imo.

Usages for other drives seems a lot more normal to my experiences over the last 2 decades. Oh, and my monitoring of drive usage is done with Perfmon, compared between Xp32, Xp64, Vista64 & Win7 64.

[braincell]

Do you think I should buy a Matrix graphics card? I'm using an MSI ATI card now and I'm not getting the performance I should. Come to think of it the old XP computer has an ATI and it doesn't get great latency either with Scope. I wonder how many ms I could knock off with a Matrox card.

[pollux]

Do you think I should buy a Matrix graphics card? I'm using an MSI ATI card now and I'm not getting the performance I should. Come to think of it the old XP computer has an ATI and it doesn't get great latency either with Scope. I wonder how many ms I could knock off with a Matrox card.

When it comes to professional applications and multi-screen setups, Matrox cards are ages ahead the "massive textured poligon spitting" NVidias and ATIs.. Even with stupid things, such as maximizing correctly a window on a two-screen setup.. Matrox do it right, whereas with an NVidia Quadro it's a pain in the a** to get it right.

[pollux]

Maybe I am influenced by what I read before but Windows 7 just feels good. It seems cleaner and more simple yet the way the icons animate when you move them or move the curser over them is interesting to me. I turned of aero in Vista because I didn't like the 3D and glass look. The transparency was distracting. They got really into gradients in Windows 7 which is beautiful to me. I know this is a superficial part.

One usually stares at the screen many hours per day, so having a neat and comfortable view is far from being superficial.
It's been said many times that Win 7 is what Vista should have been..

[valis]

Do you think I should buy a Matrix graphics card? I'm using an MSI ATI card now and I'm not getting the performance I should. Come to think of it the old XP computer has an ATI and it doesn't get great latency either with Scope. I wonder how many ms I could knock off with a Matrox card.

As good as Matrox has been in the past, I think they're losing relevance in the generalize computing world. Their products now target specific sectors with specific functionality, and their DirectX 10 support is only found in the M-series card with full support for Aero but I find my nvidia card fine for this. I don't have latency issues here, but if you think you do I would suggest using a tool to change the card's latency setting after login (like dbldawg or one of the graphics card tweaking tools that can do this).

Also I've not had multi-monitor issues with nvidia cards for several years, ATI drives still leave me wanting though (their hardware is much improved through their acquisition of ex-3dfx employess, they still need to find a good driver coder and installer team though).

[braincell]

I have an Nvidia in my other computer. I'm going to switch them and try Nvidia on my DAW. Does classic view turn Aero off? For some strange reason I am getting better latency with ASIO4ALL than Echo Audio drivers.

[valis]

Classic view disables Aero and puts the compositing back on the cpu (for even more assurance you can disable the themes service, forget what it's called now). I honestly don't think that actual performance varies much between NVidia & ATI once installed, I just find ATI's drivers SO much more fiddly when it comes to getting all features working properly (just getting overlays working for DVD & video files under the same driver can pose a huge challenge on my laptop). Both manufacturers tend to put PCI latency values at 248-254 (as has been covered quite a bit here on these forums in the past). Neither have changed in this practice, but since the PCIe bus isn't shared with the PCI bus as much on most modern chipsets it poses a lot less of an issue.

I honestly haven't any idea if doubledawg is supported in 64bit windows, let alone Win7, but you're welcome to try and give the coder feedback: http://www.mark-knutson.com/t3/dawguse.html

Incidentally I do agree with the above post, that Matrox historically has better 2d performance. It's just that they've lost so much marketshare I don't know if I would recommend them for mainstream usage, you might think of them as being a SonicCore of the GPU world

[braincell]

DoubleDawg FAQ--Please read before you use or buy DoubleDawg--and try before you buy!

* Q) Does DoubleDawg work with PCI Express?
* A) No--that is, it has no impact on PCI-X devices. PCI Express has a similar name, but is an entirely new and better bus architecture that does not involve the sharing/hogging problems that plagued the PCI buss. The good news is that a PCI-X video card won't interfere with your PCI devices, if you have any. I think most new motherboards only host PCI-X video cards--check your documentation! If you have a PCI-Express video card, there's a pretty good chance that DoubleDawg will not provide any benefit.

[Neutron]

Neutron, Virtua clone drive is free and works with w7.

I've been testing it on my laptop (64bit) with 3dMax and it works wonders. Haven't tried any big demanding things yet, but responsiveness and rendering times seems good.

well thank you very much!

off to try some w7 games

edit i just put in 8GB i got on boxing day for $40

on a side not did you know the LEDs on ballistix RAM leaches out the color from ugly day glo RAM slots? now i have half white and half ugly orange striped RAM slots

now ill go put that ballistix in my studio PC and make cubase more happy.
(after i try out this Drive faker)

[siriusbliss]

Do you think I should buy a Matrix graphics card? I'm using an MSI ATI card now and I'm not getting the performance I should. Come to think of it the old XP computer has an ATI and it doesn't get great latency either with Scope. I wonder how many ms I could knock off with a Matrox card.

Consider using your Nvidia.

Greg

[braincell]

I used the Nvidia in my new DAW and shaved off 2 ms in ASIO4ALL but better than that I can now use Cubase 64 bit in which audio didn't work before. I still can not use the Echo Audio drivers but I have full access to the hardware via ASIO4ALL. I got email from Echo Audio's so called support suggesting I use a driver from a different card of theirs which is firewire. I thought it was a rather odd thing for him to tell me but I tried it... "hardware not found" DOH!

When I installed the ATI card on the other computer I realized Valis was right. It took a long time to install and it installed the software layer he was talking about at least in XP it did. It's called .Net. It's some Microsoft crap. Now I have to update windows because I think there is some security threat to it.

[siriusbliss]

I used the Nvidia in my new DAW and shaved off 2 ms in ASIO4ALL but better than that I can now use Cubase 64 bit in which audio didn't work before. I still can not use the Echo Audio drivers but I have full access to the hardware via ASIO4ALL. I got email from Echo Audio's so called support suggesting I use a driver from a different card of theirs which is firewire. I thought it was a rather odd thing for him to tell me but I tried it... "hardware not found" DOH!

When I installed the ATI card on the other computer I realized Valis was right. It took a long time to install and it installed the software layer he was talking about at least in XP it did. It's called .Net. It's some Microsoft crap. Now I have to update windows because I think there is some security threat to it.

Avoid .net - it's glorified spyware from M$. Most hardware devs know how to avoid this so-called 'layer'. It's BS networking junk.

Seems like you also may be dealing with bus issues, since now the Nvidia lets the machine run better and audio works (streaming across the bus).

You may have some other bottlenecks to sort out yet, but I hope not.

Greg

[FrancisHarmany]

Thar is why I used VMware. It's very safe.

Its pretty safe. But no 100% seperation.