PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi guys,

I've summarised some OS Audio tips that have been given to me over the last year. I've included them here for your perusal. Many of them were gleaned from this site. I haven't given any credit, as I've forgotten who the original contributors were.

Please post on this thread if I've missed something, or made a mistake. Equally, if there's some advice, please do the same. I'm just looking for brief pointers.

I thought that it would be nice to see it all in one place. I'm one of the quiet ones on this site.

Kind Regards,
Steven
forSteven@hotmail.com

Tips
----

1. Install any low level PC drivers
- in my case... install new PCI Drivers for ASUS board
which makes my PC/Mother board compination stable(!)
- my PC is about 1 yr old now, so this may no longer be
a fix for ASUS Mother boards
- now no more nasty crashes!

2. In System, Device Manager:
CD Rom:
- Disable CDR Checking
Communications devices:
- Disable communications devices in this profile

3. In System, Device Manager, Performance, File System:
Troubleshooting:
- Disable write-behind caching for all drives
Graphics:
- Slide hardware acceleration to none
Floppy Disk:
- uncheck search for new floppy disk each time your
computer starts

4. slow down the Video card PCI bus hog:

Insert an entry in the System.ini file:

(this is for a Matrox Millenium video card)
[mga.drv]
PCIChipSet=1

5. Edit MSDos.sys. Under [Options] add (or replace) the following lines:

Logo=0
BootDelay=0

6. Find a way to set your Audio drive to ATA 33 (a better
setting for Audio):

With a seagate barracude, this involves downloading a
utility, and running it once in DOS mode to change his.

Apparently, with different manufacturers this can be
done in the Control Panel, System area somewhere.

7. Have a system hard drive, and an Audio hard drive
(either SCSI or EIDE)

- save operating system files onto the system hard
drive, and all your audio projects onto the Audio
hard drive.

8. In Control panel, System, Add new hardware:

Add new Pulsar/equivelent drivers (sound, video, and
game controllers)

9. Install Pulsar software

Other optimisations for the adventurous:
----------------------------------------

1. Setup Windows 98 with 98Lite (see www.98Lite.net), and
setup as 'Micro', or 'Chubby', for extra
performance/speed/stability.

I've just done this on a bootable test partition, and
the results are pleasing. Explorer has an immediate
response.

Too much happens behind ones back these days. The less
in an audio OS such as Win 98 the better.

(see partition magic below)

2. Make you audio environment fail safe

Back it up your PC with Norton Ghost onto a CDR (make
sure the CDR is supported by Norton Ghost first before
you buy it!)

3. Get and use 'Partition Magic'. When the tempation of
seeing what new features a software update will do for
you is too great, don't

risk destabalising your audio environment.

Check it out on a test partition for a few weeks first.

Again, do a full backup before such an undertaking...
take it from someone who paid the price. While
Partition Magic is great software, it can screw things
up.

4. Install Norton System works. Run these tests:
- Norton Disk Doctor
- Norton Win Doctor (all drives)
- Norton Speed Disk (System drive only... leave the
audio drive alone... audio files ie. .Wav operate
beter when fragmented).

For the brave:
--------------
- www.xteq.com
- Tweak UI (search for it under Microsoft.com)

Note: I haven't found anything particularly useful for
Audio in here yet. If you do, let me know.

Subject: more "usual suspects"

Great post!

You forgot to mention disabling background/startup stuff:

1. Start->Run->msconfig <enter>
2. Startup tab -- remove Microsoft FastFind, Adobe gamma correction, and anything else you can get away with. Regscan only runs once at startup and is probably fine to have in there. The fewer things running in the background (zero is best!) the better.

3. Disable screen savers! they steal CPU cycles and can cause audio glitches.

4. Disable power management! I've found i have to do this in my computer's BIOS *and* inside Control Panel->Power Management to get it to stop stealing CPU cycles.

Win98lite (works on ME) and Norton Ghost are really great suggestions, as is keeping your audio drive "fragmented." (this is because when playing back multiple big files, having clusters of different files closer together avoids more drive seeks than necessary, defraging the audio drive will essentially put all clusters for each file together, meaning your drive will have to seek past the first 80meg+ file to play the next piece from the second 80meg+ file, etc) Only defrag your application/OS drive.

Xteq rules too.

Subject: Thanks + a question

Thanks for that Seth! Things are running that little bit smoother now. I've been wondering how to knock that stuff out for a while now.

Some other questions

I've got a couple of other questions now. Does anyone know how to stop the following from starting:
* MPREXE.EXE - WIN32 Network Interface Service Process,
* SPOOL32.exe - Spooler Sub System Process
* mmtask - Multimedia background task support module
* msgsrv32 - Windows 32-bit VxD Message Server

are they all important. I'd particularly like to knock out the MPREXE.EXE and SPOOL32.EXE. ie. network support and printer support?? I'm not sure?

Steven

Subject: maybe here ?

First, thanx for the good input !

I'm not sure, but maybe you can use this method to not run any useless files :
1) Run msinfo32.exe
2) Under tools, choose "System Configuration Utillity"
3) Browse through the pages, maybe you will be able to switch your files off in "autoexec.bat" or "startup". Note, that you only uncheck the line in order not to run the program, smart, if the program turns out to be essential.
Be careful what you do in "system.ini" and "win.ini", most of the choices here makes no sense (at least not to me..), and can cause all sorts of problems. If you do change anything, I suggest that you write them down.

Now we're at it, I reckommend that you run the System file checker (sfc.exe) once in a while to make sure that no esential file has been corrupted or gone missing.

On http://www.computermusic.co.uk/tutorial/power/pc.asp
you can find a guided tour to cleaning your registry. This is also useful to do sometimes.

Hope this helps
Stubbe

Dcom: disabled 'Distributed COM on this computer'

is some kind of server controller. i don't run a server. do you?

I set access to everyone, not just admin. only users now are System, Admin, Creator Owner, User. All with full access. remove security settings form Win2k.

Atomic wrote:
"Dcom: disabled 'Distributed COM on this computer'
is some kind of server controller. i don't run a server. do you? "

DCOM is Microsoft's "Distributed Component Object Model". It is essentially for business programs. It lets programs running on a client computer access and run "objects" (i.e. programs) on a central server computer. This is useful where you might want centralised access to a business database, so it would all be done by that server computer. Other Microspeak you might hear that is related to this concept includes "COM", "COM+", "MTS".

In short, you don't need DCOM on your audio computer. However, some other MS software, such as Personal Web Server (I think), might require DCOM in order to work properly though.

hehe guess what my day job is
HTH
Mike

Sorry, but the "tip" to set Hardware acceleration to "none" (Graphics) is wrong...

If graphics acceleration is disabled, all acceleration will be done by cpu instead of video DSP. Normally, if video works fine, leave it set to "full". Could be disabled for troubleshooting video DSP. Can't find another use for the slider.