I recently installed Win7 64 after using XP for forever. Wow, it is better, as all of you that use it here have always said. Sorry I waited so long.
That said, now I am finding my way through the system, adjusting things to help the computer perform better for music recording. It is quite different from XP, although there are similarities, of course. Let me give you an example. In XP, you could link/add a library to your ‘recreational’ music player, in my case FooBar2000, and XP would not scan those files everytime you booted up. That program, and I think the WinPlayer, too, would just link the files as you played them. This is not the case with Win7. And since I have over 450G of reference music here on HD, imagine my surprise to link this library to the WinPlayer (it works great on Win7, not using FooBar at this point) and hearing my HDs purring away while I’m trying to record. When you link a library in Win7 it scans every file at bootup. This was 23,000 + files! So I dug around and found the Win7 system control panel that let me stop this. Obviously much better performance from the processor. Another example is turning off the backup system on Windows. I did this with XP, too, because its a background process that can starve the processor while you are recording. If you haven’t done this and question it, cool, just remember that you can adjust your backup of C6 independant of anything Windows, so your music is not in jeopardy. And frankly, as smooth as Win7 is, I find it very hard to believe that I could do anything to make it crash. It is VERY stable indeed. Oh, I also have a program called MirrorFolder that I use when the occasion arises, that lets me mirror my HD folders or entire HDs when I want to, although the mirror program in Win7 might also work, I dunno, haven’t tried it.
OK, so is there a trusted website that has a short list of things to do to prep a Win7 PC for recording music? Or do any of you have anything that you think worth sharing? Thanks in advance.