is your WIN DAW Online? UPDATE: POLL ADDED

Hi

Partly on-line.
Switch it on or off as needed - during recording and mixing sessions it’s off all the time.
No issues with viruses so far :wink:


Cheers

My daw is always online. No anti-virus software installed.

My “DAW” is OFFLINE (24/7) - since years.
My “Office/Plugins+Update Checking/Internet Computer” is ONLINE.

This is the best solution for me.
I´ve never had any problems with my daw computers.

regards,

C.

:bulb:

…could you maybe add a poll at the top?
(just a suggestion)
:slight_smile:

Yeah, a poll would be interesting :slight_smile:

I’m online, always have been.

Couldn’t work without it I don’t think, because I’m always curious about everything so Wiki/Google/This forum/YouTube/KVR/etc are in constant use side by side with Cubase, ProTools, Photoshop and Premiere (these being the biggies that I use professionally).

I personally use AVG. Been using this for many years. In a recent (online) effectiveness comparison test it came pretty much top of the class against all the usual suspects.

I’ve only ever had one virus spread and that was years ago, no real idea where it came from but I suspect a laptop that was on the same network. I think that MS and browsers in general have now tightened up on running things in the background without asking so its a lot safer than it used to be.

Mike.

Offline. Use a 2nd computer for all that internet stuff.

Also offline. The DAW just goes online for updates, I use a laptop for internet.

I do go online with my DAW computer. but only for authorising products. I have a Netgear Dongle for just such a purpose. As soon as I am done the dongle comes out. All larger downloads are done on my laptop. I do not browse the net. So far so good. This has become a necessary evil as some vendors do not offer offline authorisation.

Totally online. Couldnt live without it as I’m Dropboxing files, We transfer, updates etc all the time.

Me too (always online). defender is the only antivirus that does not slow down your computer. (I’ve tried them all).
Never had any problems since I started using defender. I DID tell defender to only watch my system disk and user folder, not my project, backup or sample disks…

I do use ccleaner (automaticly cleaning on startups), and sandboxie for not trusted internet activties. I also checked and tested the firewall (online port check). I need internet access for dropbox, 4shared, wetransfer, remote desktop, and google all the time. I sometimes check for problems with antimalwarebytes or hitman pro.

Also my system disk connection is outside on top of my computer, so I can connect another system disk at any time very quick. This is great in case of problems and backwords compatibility. I keep disk backups of my current and older systems, with all plugins, samples, etc. I found that even when you connect old disks to a totaly different, new computer, you can still work with it after updating and/or removing old hardware drivers.

The only thing that slows down a daw in my experience is installing programs ( and services) that work in the background all the time…but well designed apps like dropbox, they use a lot of memory, true, but they just use cpu while syncing, and that’s it.

Online, 24-7

I can’t find any reason why NOT to be online.
Having email and web available sorts out 99% of the reasons why people maintain a 2nd PC
Things like distractions and dodgy websites is really the user, not the interwebz.

Just upgrade your system to win10, it’s robust and secure and call it a day.
If you don’t want to share telemetry you can adjust your privacy settings.
With ccleaner you can remove all the crap that you don’t use, like patience, us newspapers, xbox store, celebrity crap etc etc.
You will then have a very stable, fast and secure skeleton system. Perfect for business.
The risk is the user, not the connection.

My studio PC is online and I run AVG. The only problem I have is occasionally my wifi driver causes audio drop outs (depending on the version of the driver and whether it’s been fixed from one version to the next - so it comes and goes)

but in the main - I’ve been doing that for years and have had no problems. Hope that helps

Way back in the day (Win 98) I used to have a dual boot machine - one Win98 partition for music, the other Win98 parition for blah blah blah. This was due to the generally poor performance and lack of sandboxing with the monolithic Win9x architecture. Honestly, the need to do this went away with Win XP (technically NT) forward - but some of us are still jumpy for some reason. You don’t need to separate your music environment from your “normal” environment anymore - seriously. You’re making life really hard for yourself, as all the current tools assume an online connection of some kind. And they’re assuming you have an online connection because…it’s perfectly safe to do so in this day and age.

Studio computers in professional mix bays are online. I can’t imagine going to a session and not being able to have a conversation about something musical on the internet. My DAW is up 24/7 and I make 100% of my living from it - no possible way I could survive being offline with all the files I have to receive and send back to clients. Not sure how some of you guys can tolerate moving things back and forth on a USB stick…with my workload I would go insane :cry:

Granted, I don’t install applications that create competition with real-time audio. But if the concern is just being “online”, you have little to worry about.

As far as security - if you simply must surf to “questionable” (lol) sites, and are really concerned:

  1. If you’re not on Windows 10, use a non-Microsoft browser. I use Chrome. It constantly updates itself in the background to the latest secure build, which stays one step ahead of the security issues. I went to Chrome in 2011 and that was the end of that. More recent versions of Windows (e.g. Win10) make this less of an issue.

  2. DON’T CLICK ON STUPID THINGS. Amazing how many people, in 2015, still click on “You’ve Won!”

  3. When you download files, right-click on the file and manually run your scanner before extracting the contents.

Getting viruses has 99% to do with browsing habits. I never had real-time security until after I got a virus in 2011, then I enabled Windows Defender, which is lightweight and highly effective. That’s the only time I’ve ever had one, and that was without protection of any kind. My mom, on the other hand, is constantly SWIMMING in viruses no matter how tight I lock down her machine, and no matter how many uber-tweaky security measures I implement. Habits, people - keep this in mind :wink:

Right - WiFi is one of those “may compete with real-time audio” issues. If your computer isn’t close enough to the router to use a wired connection, might I suggest one of these:

It propagates the WiFi signal to the room of your choice, then you run a physical LAN cable from it into the ethernet port of your computer. From your computer’s perspective, it is a wired connection. I do this for the computer in my living room, as the WiFi receiver is dodgy. Works great! It was $50 at Target (USA).

I don’t make my money with Cubase so it runs on my private computer, and as long as I can remember, I always did everything with my one PC: Music, games, graphic software, internet and so on. And it’s always online (since this became affordable…).

I never ever had serious problems with Cubase.

And there’s always Avira Anti Virus running in the background - also causing me no problems with the DAW (and with nothing else, I guess).

I’m running 2 PC’s one for DAW the other for internet and for testing software and new plugiins

My DAWs have always been online 24/7, been doing it that way since the late 90s. Right now I got 3 DAWs, all 3 are online doing whatever at any given time. I rarely use antivirus, and rarely get viruses because I don’t anything too stupid with my machines, so generally speaking my stuff runs smoothly and is clean.