Windows 7 Bootcamp Question?

Hi folks,

Me again. I have a couple of questions regarding Bootcamp. With all the fun talk about Cubase 6 running better on a PC I wanted to give it a try. I don’t know. Just curiosity I guess. So here it goes….

I installed Windows 7 Home Premium on my iMac via Bootcamp. Everything installed perfectly. Had the machine running nice and smoothly. Windows was up to date with the service pack. The machine had an index performance rate of 7.2. Considering how picky Microsoft can be regarding its hardware, I was actually impressed that it got such a high score. It was a beautiful thing. That is…….

Until I installed my Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 firewire interface. I’ve never heard so many crackles and pops. I was quite surprised that it was making so much noise. I mean I followed all the directions on the interwebs. I disabled a lot of windows servicing crap. Knocked down the visual performance. I even changed the firewire driver to the legacy driver and I was still getting the pops. I disabled my wifi connection. Yet, It would happen every 1 minutes or so. For the life of me I can’t understand why I’m getting these damn pops. My machine is so damn quick too.

Here is how I tested it. I installed my Vienna Instruments. Loaded it up and used a latency buffer of 512. Just to be sure. It played just fine. No delay whatsoever until it started to pop a minute later. The ASIO buffer on my Focusrite mixer is set to 512 as well. Now I’m at a lost. Everything was running perfect via OSX. Again this is just an experiment.

So my questions are,
Could it be my firewire interface that’s causing the issue? Am I missing something?
Or this a stupid idea that I should just scrap?

System Specs:
iMac 21.5 Mid 2011 – i7 Cpu, 32GB Ram, 240SSD OS HD, 1TB Samples Drive, 1TB eSata Drive.
OSX – Mountain Lion 10.8.2, Cubase 6.5, EWQL, VSL VEP 5, VSL Instruments PRO, Kontakt 5.
Focusrite Saffire Pro 24, Novation Impulse

Scratch that. Figured it out. Turns out it was the bootcamp.exe that was screwing it up. I disabled it and viola. It works great now. :mrgreen:

Ive been thinking about trying bootcamp as well, how is it working for you? Do you notice much of a difference performance wise? Main reason Id be switching is to use some of my old vst’s that are win only so I dont know if its more headache than its actually worth. Im currently running osx 10.8.2 on both my mbp and my iMac and not had any of the reported stability issues yet.

Hey PSYNTHETIK_,

Not to stir any trouble but I did find Cubase snappier in Windows 7. Of course in typical Windows fashion it only uses 16GB of Ram because I’m currently using the Home Edition. Bunch of BS if you ask me since my machine has 32GB. I guess you have to upgrade to Pro which I wasn’t about to do. Also, I wanted to mention that I loaded up an orchestral template with 130 tracks armed and ready to go without using a slave. I was just using one machine with VEP5. Recorded about 70 tracks with Legato patches, sustains, eq, reverbs, and it performed well. Had about 60% of my 4 cores being used and about 13GB of RAM being used.

My impressions thus far.

Cubase 6.5 WIN7
Snappy as hell on PC. Don’t get me wrong, it works well in the OSX environment but you can definitely feel the difference. Had one crash and it was related to Kontakt. No biggie.

Once I ironed out all the tweaks and audio BS it was really stable. East West HS, HB, Symphony Platinum, VOP, Goliath, and Pianos performed exceptionally well. Not one hiccup. Faster loading times as well.

Vienna Ensemble Pro 5, Instruments Pro kicked ass as well.

Cubase 6.5 OSX
Have had multiple crashes. Sonic Halion SE was the culprit. No biggie since I don’t really use it that often. ASIO occasional spikes.

EWQL all loaded just fine. Not as fast as W7 but it still loaded.

VSL stuff loaded pretty well too. I think the folks at Vienna really know how to program their poop. It just works.

Conclusion
As I previously mentioned this was just an experiment. I really wanted to see the difference in both operating systems. I’m glad I did. It was a great learning experience and I must admit, Windows has come a long way for DAW production. Props to Microsoft. The only thing I hated about all this was the damn preparation in the operating system. Too much tweaking for my taste.

Now, after all was said and done I reverted back to OSX and erased my Win7 drive back to Mac format. I’m just more comfortable with OSX and I’m pretty happy with the performance that I’m getting at the moment. I hope this helps!

Cheers.

Thanks for the reply! I think after reading that, and the fact Im not having any stability issues its probably not worth the headaches for a couple of plugins. I appreciate you taking the time to give a good review on both systems, defiantly made my decision alot easier.