Windwos 10 Pro 1809 or Windows 10 LTSB 1607 for Notation and DAW

Dorico
#1

Hello Dorico and Steinberg crew,
I would like to ask you about your professional opinion. Which Windows 10 distribution you would recommend for music production /notation and DAW/
10 Pro 1809, or 10 LTSB 1607? For running Cubase Pro and in the future Dorico Pro.
Still I’m Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 user, but I’ll need to upgrade soon.
The thing I don’t like in Windows 10 Pro are:

  1. Too much unwanted apps and processes /Cortana, Xbox, Office, MS Store, Games… etc./
  2. Frequent OS Upgrades /Twice a year/.
  3. Needs more tweaking than Windows 7 and very often after OS upgrade the customized configuration is lost
    and needs to be re-tweaked. /I have experience with Windows 10 Pro on Virtual machine/

On the other side Windows 10 LTSB is cleaner, lighter, faster and more stable than 10 Pro, no frequent OS upgrades /Exactly what I like in Windows 7/
I know that support for newest processors is limited and comes only with the OS upgrade, once on two years, but I don’t upgrade my hardware often.

I don’t have any experience with Windows 10 on production system…

But if Windows 10 Pro is the better choice for long therm using, I will go for it…

Thank you in advance for the professional help! :slight_smile:

Greetings :slight_smile:

#2

I’m running Windows 10 pro (I got free upgrade from Win 7 about 6 months after it was first released) and I don’t have any of those running. It took about 5 minutes to get rid of Cortana, the rest take up a bit of disk space but don’t run unless you use them.

With 10 Pro you get a few months delay receiving updates compared with 10 Home (so with luck the bugs will have been found by other people not you!) and you can choose not to have any updates installed automatically.

Personally I just let it do what it wants (except for choosing my own time to reboot after updates) and so far nothing has gone wrong with Windows (though NVidia have screwed up their graphics card driver updates a couple of times).

My suspicion is that the people who make the most noise about the problems they have with Windows either try to “improve” it without really knowing what they are doing, and/or have the 32-bit Home edition, probably running on barely adequate hardware.

The first version of WIndows I used was Windows 95, and IMO Win 10 is the most stable so far (second best was XP, and third best was 98SE - WIn 7 doesn’t beat those two.)

#3

Agree. Windows 10 has been a solid version from my experience (well, nothing can match XP, but that ship has sailed).

Also, Windows 7 is sorta-kinda-not-exactly officially recommended for Dorico: https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=138853

#4

I’ve been developing with build 1803 and its been incredibly stable. I often go for a few weeks without needing to reboot. I’d advise the general rule with any OS - stay away from the bleeding edge, and only update to the latest and greatest after it’s been out for a couple of months.

#5

Yup this… I’m on 1803 too and it’s been absolutely fine. Given the recently reported problems Microsoft has had with the latest update I’m inclined to stay well away for a bit until they sort it out. :wink: