Just wondering if any of the idiosyncrasies I've assumed are bugs may be the result of tweaking I've done to speed up my PC.

benjaminfrog
Just wondering if any of the idiosyncrasies I've assumed are bugs may be the result of tweaking I've done to speed up my PC.

All of our QA testing is done on clean installations of Windows 7/8. When I was in Tech Support I tended to field more calls from people who modified their Windows installations. That's just anecdotal evidence though.
 
Personally, I haven't found a need to tweak in the last 2-3 years, modern systems have a ton of power to spare.

Thanks for your response, Seth. I appreciate seeing you on the board today.
 
Yeah, the risk/benefit ratio isn't what it used to be. My PC is 3 years old, but it's still probably powerful enough that I could go back to the default services settings without seeing too much of a hit. Just wondering if anyone knew of any specific dependencies. 
 
Thanks, again.
 

benjaminfrog
Thanks for your response, Seth. I appreciate seeing you on the board today.
 
Yeah, the risk/benefit ratio isn't what it used to be. My PC is 3 years old, but it's still probably powerful enough that I could go back to the default services settings without seeing too much of a hit. Just wondering if anyone knew of any specific dependencies. 
 
Thanks, again.
 

I remember a few, but I can't recall off hand. I'll see if I can grab a white paper on this.

Awesome! Thanks, Seth.

There are 2 services which I turned off thinking they weren't needed. Both were related to audio.
 
Turns out Sonar needed both of them in order for Midi to function as normal.
 
Can't remember the name of them right now - if I get a chance later I'll have a look and see what I can find.

Hello everyone, this topic brings me the question about the relationship between tweaking (not necessary now?) versus latency reduction. I have a powerful system, but my latency is bad without a few things disabled. Could we have the white paper also for recommendations on tweaks for latency reduction with win 8 pro? 
Thanks! 

Personally i have used a W7 64bit setup based on one or two of Black Vyper's tweaks, but i tend to put the services on Manual, then stop them. That way if W7 needs them, it will call them. Eg : some of iTunes related services.

Bluetooth (don't use it for latency reasons), i have stopped. Again, see the Black Vyper site.

Do not select the famous Background Services option within Windows it i sredundant on W7 and above.

With plenty of RAM (8 and above) IMHO its not necessary, these days to do too much tweaking, nor turn off that many services.

Cheers,
Jerry

I haven't done any adjustments on 7 other than setting visual effects to best performance and processor scheduling to background services.

When configuring new DAWs, we do tweak the BIOS/OS.
 
A lot of this is shutting down power-management or options for the OS to throttle speed.
Generally speaking, you don't want apps running in the background that aren't necessary... and you don't want the system managing tasks (scheduling/etc) that aren't 100% necessary.
ie: Don't have backup software running on a schedule in the background.
When it's time to backup, start the process manually.
 
If your BIOS exposes them, there are settings that can affect DPC latency.
Graphics drivers often cause high DPC latency (as does WiFi).
If you're having DPC latency issues, disabling services likely won't resolve the issue.
In many cases, there's no solution to higher DPC latency other than to replace hardware.
ie:  Tried moving my GTX-560Ti to my new DAW... but the driver caused major DPC latency spikes.
Replaced with a 660Ti and the problem was solved.
 
Regarding services, on a current generation build, you'll see virtually no performance gain by randomly shutting down what seem to be needless services.
Years back, I remember shutting down unnecessary services on a secondary DAW.  Went to install a M-Audio Firewire audio interface (FW1814 I believe) and the unit would "install" but wouldn't work properly.
After hours of trouble-shooting, I realized that I had shut down "extraneous" services ~6 months prior (had completely forgotten about it).  Turned on those services... and voila!  The FW1814 worked fine.