Windows 7 - articles of interest...

[siriusbliss]

FYI...If you haven't already seen these interesting articles re: Windows 7.

http://blog.cakewalk.com/how-windows-7- ... roduction/

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/09/2 ... #more-7680

Greg

[dawman]

Very informative thanks.
That Noel guy sure looks like Super Mario.....

[valis]

Biggest issue I've had...(and mostly on other people's machines)

Some apps that aren't used to starting with user-only privs will have preference panels or similar items that may not open properly. If you don't want to disable UAC altogether, set the app to launch in xp compat. mode or enable admin access in the shortcut's properties and deal with the UAC prompt.

Wavelab 5's unofficial Vista 'fix' may not work for Win7, Wavelab 6 works (I just run 5 on the my secondary Scope PC now.)

A lot of firewire devices have drivers that work fully under Vista yet they mysteriously may not work under Win7 (ie, trying to use Vista-compatible drivers when a company doesn't explicitly list Win7 next to a specific driver release.) Go into device manager & change the driver for the firewire chipset to "1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy)." I've noticed a bit of reduced performance using this but it will allow usage until Win7 drivers are properly implemented.

[krizrox]

There was something on the Cakewalk forum regarding Win7 64 bit and CPU loading. There is something in Win 7 64 that turns cores on or off and you need to disable that routine in the registery. I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about. Doesn't affect duo-core machines. Just passing along a bit of early morning trivia.

There was a blurb in the TV news this morning about Best Buy - they have locked cages full of computers waiting for the Win 7 roll out in the next day or two.

[valis]

Disable Enhanced EIST in your pc's bios if you want to disable the ability for cores to 'turn off' (and disable EIST and C1/C3 states if you don't want your cores clocking down at ALL.) Enhanced EIST only comes with i7, i5 & nehelem based Xeons, EIST is core2 based and C1/C3 states go back to the P4 era (but only really something you'd worry about with Merom-based Core1 and forward.)

I don't worry much about C1/C2 or EIST on Windows, but I can see where people who are using DAWs largely for tracking want to keep cores from clocking off or down so that their juice is 'always ready'. With largely electronic productions this isn't as much of a concern imo...(though it might affect Sonar more than other apps, I haven't used it.)

Also worth noting that the nehelem based Mac Pros are possibly affected a lot more by these 'micro'-clocking techniques for power saving, although Grand Dispatch Central (libdispatch) in OS X 10.6 is supposed to rectify this over time (as Apple's code is improved and other developers make more use of it.)

[valis]

Have just installed Win7 Pro (64bit) and blown away my Xp64, Win7 RC & Xp32 installs. Technically I'm upgrading from Vista but I wanted a clean install, more on this below. I installed with a Win7 Pro 64bit via a preorder Upgrade license & media downloaded from a microsoft provided download link (files that auto extracted to an iso, which I 'burned' to 4gb 'high speed' usb key & a backup dvd). I was hesitant to order the Upgrade specifically because I like fresh installs more, but I thought I would take a chance due to previous Windows versions having various 'upgrade' tricks.

Before Vista you could duplicate & move partitions during the install process to around to get 'clean' install activation issues (ie, with Xp.) To get a clean install with Vista & Vista SP1 'upgrade media (instead of migrating a bunch of cruft from a previous install) you could format, install the OS and cancel activation so that install was technically running in 'demo' mode for a limited time period. If you then re-ran the Vista upgrade install from *within* that first install, you would effectively do an install over the top of itself. After the second install it would activate, and it was easy to do from the same DVD or USB key, and more easily migrated across hardware than an OEM license. (I have enough NT4, Xp & Win2k licenses lying around to not feel unethical doing it either although MS's official stance always states you must install the previous OS version first, which imo is just creating clutter.)

So I thought I'd give this a shot with Win7 and see how I fared (only a $99 loss for the preorder upgrade if it didn't work.) I completely wiped my windows OS drive (Xp32, Xp64 & Win7 RC 64bit) and created a 175GB primary partition and did fresh install. It activated without asking for any previous install or license key (whereas Vista would fail activation on the first install and you would have to call). Basically with the ISO I downloaded from MS I didn't need to do the 'install over itself' trick to get clean install from upgrade media/licensing. I've been reading similar reports elsewhere with retail copies from major US retailers. But I also read theories that certain keys and media given out were from retail lists just to meet demand...

Also note that Win7 Home & Pro don't have 'bitlocker' and the other niceties from Ultimate, but the installer will still create a 100MB 'boot' partition for bitlocker usage and the boot files. This isn't necessary for Home & Pro, and I've read that you can preformat your intended drive to be fully partitioned & avoid this. I like having a separate boot partition personally, I find it cleaner, so I didn't bother to change this.

Everything that worked under the RC works here, and of course my Scope cards are in a secondary PC running Xp. The only 2 things that currently do NOT work are an old serial based 12x12 ArtZII Wacom tablet from 1995 (which would actually still work under Win7-32bit Intuos usb with a quick registry entry to point to Com1/2, to give them credit) and an m-audio midi interface that they claim they'll eventually release drivers for as well. These were the Xp64, and then Vista64 drivers that also never materialized, they say they now need to port these to win7-64 and are skipping both previous OS's. I would have purchased a second MOTU Micro-express except I had a hard time finding them in retail channels earlier this year when I had the spare cash. I'll finally be plopping down for Wavelab6 upgrade too I guess...

[kylie]

I'll finally be plopping down for Wavelab6 upgrade too I guess...

if you upgrade from WL4 or earlier - have fun
I wasn't able to install it because none of my current drives (and I have quite a selection to choose from) were able to read the wl4 cd when asked for by the install routine. only when I connected my old teac r55 cd writer via usb2scsi the cd was fully readable. in case you succeed anyway with a recent drive I'd like to hear about it...

-greetings, markus-

[valis]

Wavelab5, which I was actually able to make work under Vista64 via compatibility settings & running with admin privs. Still doesn't seem to work in Win7-64 retail (and hasn't worked for Beta or RC so am unsurprised.)

[kylie]

the last update to wl6 was release 11/2007, so let's assume it won't work either...