Windows 7 64-bit - Installation and configuration tips?

From what I understand, Win 7 maintains SSD performance automatically.  The installation of Win 7 on to an SSD is the same as it is for a standard hard drive.  If you run into any issues with the installation of Win 7 on to an SSD, it's more likely a motherboard BIOS or hard drive controller issue.

Excellent!  I look forward to having an all-in-one, although I will start with just the DAW stuff and migrate the games and other stuff to it slowly.

I found Win7 needs no tweaking (unlike XP).

In each version of Windows, I usually disable system restore (because I prefer making drive images manually) and indexing (because I don't search often and don't mind when it's slow).  Will there be any harm in disabling those in Win7?  Did you keep them enabled?

Try to keep audio on a separate drive.

Yeah, I always have multiple disks, and put the audio on the first partition of the second disk.

Turn off wireless when working on DAW (or use hardwire)

I'd use ethernet only; no wireless.

be sure you only have your "real" audio card profiled in Sonar.

Do you still have your "non-real" audio card enabled in Windows?  Is it onboard or something like an XFi?  Do you think having an onboard sound card enabled in Windows will interfere w/ Sonar even if it's disabled in Sonar?

Also, did you create a FAT32 boot partition in addition to your system partition?  I've always done that, though I forget why; I think it's a habit from the days when I multi-booted a lot.  If I don't plan to multi-boot, can I skip the boot partition?

And how about the swap partition - I usually create one of those, but I'm wondering if it's better to just leave the swap file in C:

I too used to do most of the things you mention with partitioning etc.  I have stopped just about all tweaking and funky configuration under win 7 64.  I just use 3 HDs.  One for system and programs, one for audio, one for samples and everything else.

As for the other sound card, I'm sure someone will chime in and say this is a horrible idea, but I have always run two:  one for Sonar (a Echo Gina PCI card), and I use the built in motherboard 5.1 sound card for gaming, listening to music, watching movies etc.

As long as Sonar does not configure the onboard card to use, I have never run into an issue.  Everything runs smooth as silk here on this multiuse computer.  Hope you have the same luck!

I made the mistake of making my system drive a 500MB SSD (Alienware).

The SSD should be for sample libraries and files only.  There are many reasons for that:
1) Sonar Boot time is NOT enhanced, but degregated.
2) SSD files are meant to be sought ... dlls work slowly on SSDs, IMO.
3) SSDs become corrupted after repeated writes
4) SSDs are only great for NI and EWQL and large/numerous sample files
5) Window's search and other window's services operate precariously with SSDs.
6) When SSDs are slow seeking (from multi-writes?) ... Melodyne cracks up on Win 64/7

These are just my personal results/hypotheses and require further testing/validations.

In Sum:

If not too late, do yourself a favor and purchase a 1TB/64mByte HD or something (<$100) for your system drive.  Use your SSD for numerous large data streaming files ... separately (non-system drive).

I'm with Hayn12. Great boot time, fast response. But even with a SSD drive and a 6 core CPU, Sonar will still have it's moments of "Not Responding" but not that often.

I have SSD's in 3 computers I use for boot drives.  All are 3-5 times faster booting and loading programs than when I was using fast hard drives.  I actually decided not to upgrade my desktop that I use for everyday use after installing the SSD.  This computer is used for email, internet, games, etc.  The SSD's make this machine scream although the CPU, a Core 2 Duo, is now over 4 years old. So between upgrading to an SSD and putting a decent video card it now has at least another year or 2 of use before upgrading.

My laptop was so darn slow with the 5200 rpm hard drive that it was frustrating.  It's my work computer and so is loaded with security software than I have no control over loading.  It would take at least 10 minutes to boot to a working desktop!  Another 3-4 minutes to shutdown.  With the SSD it is now around 1-1/2 minutes to boot to the desktop.  This machine is a domain machine so group policies are being pushed to it.  It is now a usable machine!  The prior 15 minutes to reboot was just excruciating.  Now it takes about 2 minutes for a reboot.  BTW, that's with loading McAfee HIPS and Antivirus, Instant Messenger plus the other crap that is needed for the laptop.

Jim 

Ok I found a post that suggested installing Beatscape and Dim Pro on the C drive and the sample libraries on the second drive which I have done but now when I open a project DP can't find the wave files I'm not sure why it didn't tell itself where to look when I selected those settings but it didn't.  Is there some way to tell a plug in where to look for the waves without doing the install over again?  I also did the 1.5 update for DP and now the shortcut that landed on the desktop is 1.5 but the one in Sonar is still 1.2 the desktop version will load but I can't here a thing and have selected my midi in and audio out, any help would be appreciated thanks.