I see. I know of that and occasionally used it in kontakt. I’m also unloading unused kit pieces in BFD 3 when i don’t forget to to so. But i think that memory isn’t usually the bottleneck in my productions.
Any more suggestions on processor choice based on the typical production requirements i provided in my last post?
I don’t really know enough, but I would say your projects are medium duty. A professional composer for orchestras+ more would use many hundreds of tracks, but as I said above there is a lot you can do to lighten the load. Set up your template well, purge where you can. I forgot to mention that in Kontakt you can change the size of the headers with a fast SSD you could probably get away with this. There is one SSD M2 drive, the Samsung 960 Pro which is blazingly fast and would make an ideal sample drive, they are expensive, but 7 times faster than most regular SSDs. They are hitting the streets as we speak, they are jawdroppingly fast. I will buy here
Yeah, that’s the point. My work isn’t focused on huge track count or heavy RAM intensive orchestral libraries. It’s fewer tracks but can be “heavy” Soft-synth and VST FX-wise on some of the channels.
Also thinking about getting the 960 Pro.
Anything regarding Win 10 Home vs Pro and regular vs OEM license?
I have a template loaded here, it has the whole of EW Symphonic Orchestra, every instrument and articulation, Keyscape, Omnisphere, Trillian, RMX, The Grand 3, True Pianos, BFD3. They are all disabled. It has over two hundred instrument tracks and many folders. It has a bit of music in it too (four test bars per track). It’s currently using 1.3% CPU and 390 mb of RAM (yes megabytes) . That is what disabling tracks can do. If I loaded all the sounds at once I guess the whole system might crash, but that does not matter, as I dont think I shall every need to have everything sounding at once - in music less is more.
Re Win10 Home and Pro, I personally went for the Pro version when using Win7 and as I upgraded this year I’m now on Win10Pro. I’ve heard it gives you a bit more control over the system settings, particularly some networking features, but I’m not a great expert. I do tend to turn off or uninstall a fair amount of the stuff that comes as standard, and whether this is easier in Pro or Home I couldn’t really say.
However, there’s one feature of Win10Pro which I definitely like, and that’s being able to stop the automatic OS updates!! I have my DAW fully internet’d up and I use it for a lot of other things as well as music (office work, emails, graphics/photos, video) and both Pro and Home are configured to automatically update and automatically reboot without asking first. In Home you can’t stop this at all, although both versions ‘try’ to do this during ‘quiet’ times, but then these can turn out to be those all-night recording sessions!!! However, in the Pro version you can tweak the OS so that it always asks you before installing the updates - just like it used to in Win7. This feature I value a lot because I can set aside some down time for it to be done.
Mike.
That’s a good point re Pro/Home! I’ve been reading about it, but i didn’t know that Home would actually re-start the machine without asking! Are you sure about that or might Home allow you to “re-boot and install later”?
Well, I could always be wrong because things change regularly, but I tend to keep my ear to the ground and it’s my understanding that you can only defer/schedule the installation and reboot to a ‘quiet’ time, e.g. 3am, at which point it will not be deferrable again. And you can only defer a maximum of 18 hours.
There is a back door way to stop this on Home though, and that’s to set your internet connection to be ‘metered’ which implies that you pay for your data usage. The OS will then not download updates on the basis that you may be charged a lot for the download. I think you may then have to manually check for updates and download them yourself, but I haven’t tried this feature on Home (I let my laptop do the auto thing). Also, this is a pain on a laptop because you have to manually set this individually for each internet connection - which means each wireless connection!
So, I prefer Pro because it informs me there’s an update but I can ignore it until I’m ready. To do this you need to make some registry adjustments to force ‘Notify Before Install’ (an option not available in Home) which means you will be prompted when new downloads are available but you can refuse to accept the install and thus it won’t install/reboot.
Of course, the auto-upgrade feature is there so that MS can plug the latest security loop-holes as fast as possible. This helps to protect you, the OS and your data from viruses and other malicious attacks, so if your PC is on the internet then you should really keep it updated. I’ve personally had no problems with any windows updates ever, right from XP through to Win10, but some people prefer not to install updates because it may upset their stability.
Mike.
I’m fine with updating on a regular basis, i just don’t want to be forced to reboot when i don’t want to.
There’s also another way to stop the automatic restart, at least on Windows Pro. It’s a bit advanced though.
Using Run gpedit.msc, set Local Group Policy>Configure Automatic Updates to “3 - Auto download and notify for install” and set to Enabled.
The result is that all updates, even those that don’t require a restart require user intervention.
Now, i’d only need to know if that is also possible in the Home version 
This is why I also use Windows Pro.
With Home, you can probably do it in the Windows Registry.
Check out this article: https://techjourney.net/permanently-disable-prevent-automatic-restart-of-windows-update-in-windows-10/
Thanks, Steve