I’m thinking of building a new machine this year as budget and (down)time will allow.
Question #1:
Does it make sense to build a computer around a current CPU like the i7-7820x or i7-8700k or should we have some patience for the next generation(s) that are not by design hit by the Meltdown/Spectre problems? Is the performance loss relevant at all or more a hypothetical thing?
Question #2:
Staying with Windows 7 or going to 10?
I’m a little paranoid maybe because of the spying functions that are not so easy to bypass as well as forced updates. My DAW is offline apart from doing (sound)software updates so my guess is I should be fine. Would love to hear more real world experiences regarding Windows 10 and DAW usage…
Just get one now if you need it. The Spectre/Meltdown have no real impact on DAW performances or any normal consumer computer performances. It only really shows a difference in synthetic benchmarks.
Go Windows 10. It sounds like you are still using the reasons to stay at Win 7 that were somehow true when Win 10 was just released, but it has all changed long time ago. Also as in regards to the Spectre/Meltdown, you are more likely to see some performance degradation in Win 7 and 8 as the patches are not as effective as in Windows 10.
My thoughts were to prevent forced updates by disabling the internal update service altogether/enable it to do updates manually. Heard that works.
What’s going on with the whole telemetry complex? It’s a weird imagination that the OS collects each single touch of a button to transmit it to Microsoft. Switching that thing off seems not so easy, my guess is that any setting W10 allows the user to do isn’t much more than fake control while the OS does whatever it’s programmed to do.
With a mostly offline DAW this wouldn’t happen permanently but still it’s not a friendly idea to get completely ‘naked’ should I go online for updates and the like and the whole data collection gets submitted anyway. Is there any known way to effectively keep Win 10 from collecting user data at all?
Of course the moment will come sooner or later when old OS won’t be supported by major parts of the software I use, so on the long run I won’t be able to get along with my ‘vintage Windows’.
It’s easy to turn that off and if I remember correctly you are even asked during installation if you want it on or off. For the forced updates you can buy Win 10 Pro which afaik will let you select which updates to get. With that said I’m on Win 10 Home and never had any issues with the automatic and forced updates.
Cubase and many other applications will also likely perform better under Windows 10.
In addition to what KHS said I think what will end up happening is that the “fixes” won’t be architectural but just more of the same but included in the release of new chips. In other words it isn’t the vulnerability that is ‘deleted’, it’s that the fix we see today that’s incorporated into the new chips. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression at least.
W10.
Also, I really wish people would stop talking like that. It isn’t “spying”, and MS isn’t capturing everything you type at all times. What happens is that you can customize how much data you’re willing to send, but even if you send a fair amount a lot of it has to do with MS providing you with a service. If you take Courtana for example, the way I have it set up is that as soon as I start typing in the search bar it’ll start giving me results that include results from “Bing”. Of course in order to do so it has to access MS’ servers. To me that isn’t spying, it’s just MS trying to provide me with a more comprehensive and seamless service. I no longer have to open up a browser and then go to a search engine website to complete my search.
In addition, from what I understand, the data is anonymized. On top of that MS has fought the US government on cases where the government wanted access to emails stored abroad. So MS is taking things seriously, and out of all the things people do these days I’d say MS products are NOT a big concern. I had my Yahoo account hacked into among with over a Billion of other accounts. So there’s that.
Apart from that the DAW runs fine here and I love the W10 user interface. I have a W10 Mobile phone actually and the experience is similar. I love the live tiles and notifications in W10. I click the Win key and immediately see my work-email folder status (new mails, who the sender is, headline), friends email folder, other emails folder, weather updates, calendar, breaking news headlines… It’s very convenient…
Alright, I get the convenience aspect. That’s just not how I use my devices. Start to feel bothered quickly by messages and news I prefer to consciously look for messages, mails, posts etc. and definately DON‘T want all the automatic beeps and boings all day long.
I‘ve done my W10 homework meanwhile, it seems to be configurable to my liking without getting into big troubles. Thanks for clarifying that the initial W10 oddities are ok meanwhile!
Oh I agree, it’s just a personal preference. Windows phone OS is kept updated, and even though they no longer make the phones and it’s an essentially dead platform Microsoft is offering more updates for security and bug fixes than I ever got for my Android phone. Microsoft’s phone ‘life-support’ is WAY better support as far as updates go, even AFTER it’s officially declared ‘dead’, than Android ever was for me.
It’s actually quite sad that Win 10 Phones never took off. So many great things about the OS.
I can see that as well. Again I think it’s personal and thankfully configurable. My Windows 10 desktop is for both work and leisure, so to me it’s not a problem to have messages etc pop up. It doesn’t interfere with my computer experience. If this was a work-only machine in a dedicated studio then it’d be an issue probably…
…although I will say quite a few people keep their cellphones next to them while working in the studio and do check what the messages are when they appear. So for people who do not having to check the phone and just look at a bigger screen seems… as good or better…
Almost everyone does it all the time
Got myself a pair of new monitors recently, they’re pretty sensitive to mobile phones, reminding me of ‚phone too close‘ if so. A complete different discussion of course but I actually wonder that hardly anybody cares how relevant the bigger part of all those messages really are. I say so while typing this post into my phone… now what does that mean
I prefer to consciously look for messages, mails, posts etc. and definately DON‘T want all the automatic beeps and boings all day long.