spanky


I recently put XP forever on the shelf and went to Windows 7 64 bit. XP was solid as a rock for me, and so is Win7. I am glad I made the change. The only thing I had to change was my sound card because Emu did not have drivers for windows 7, only a beta--and I wasn't going to chance it. Other than that the transition was smooth and painless and now I am finally in 64 bit land! OP you might want to consider making the jump.

Hey, Spanky, I just ran through a bunch of tests for that beta driver for Windows 7 x64, and it works great.  My buddy has an E-MU Tracker Pre audio interface, and is happily running 24-bit audio recording at 48K with no issues whatsoever.  I too was cautious in that beta driver, but I was given the opportunity by the owner of the computer to give it a shot, and it tested out well, and he loves it in his new Windows 7 x64 environment with the X2 Producer he just picked up.  He upgraded from Sonar 8.5.3 Producer Edition, and loves the new interface.  He is a guitar player, so complicated things like anything in life outside some sort of modal scale are close to impossible, but he is functional in X2 where he struggled in 8.5.3 - (kidding, please do not hate me any of you guitar players - kidding).


Bob Bone

moffdnb


Win 7 smaller footprint?

What do you mean by this?  I noticed that as far as taking up disk space, Win 7 64bit is way bigger then XP.  I've uninstalled some uneeded stuff (games, outlook etc) on my DAW PC and am happy with Win7 64bit but still wonder what all those GBs of stuff are inside the Windows folder itself.

Perhaps I put that wrongly. I was actually talking about memory usage, and what I meant was that although Windows 7 appears to use more RAM, it's actually more efficient than XP in that it uses as much as is available, while automatically freeing it as soon as applications need it. It's certainly more efficient when you consider how much more advanced 7 is in terms of features. 

Indeed yes but curious.  Why all those xtra GBs on disk space?

I'd love to chop it down even further but will leave well enough alone if needs be.  ;>

It's hard to find 8 track cassette players anymore.

Another thing to check is that drivers are available for older equipment. When I went from XP Pro to Win 7 x64, I found that some peripherals were no longer supported. Bob's recommendation with the RAM is a good one. I personally only use 8Gb of 1633 RAM, and it runs about 50% even keel with a fairly aggressive load on it. I also admit that I kicked and screamed before I knuckled under and got Win7, but am glad that I did... then again, I am primarily a guitar player, so maybe Bob's other point has validity with me :D

Wow - I think that's a first for me - right twice in the same thread?  Never had that before - so I WAS correct on the guitar player thing.  hmmmm

Bob Bone  

You'd be raving mad to run XP on a new machine, and If you want to use memory over 4gb you have to go 64 bit.

Go Win8 64 bit.


PS XP was a great operating system unlike Vista, but its time to move on. Win 7 wins on XP hands down for instance in pretty much every way.

CakeAlexS


You'd be raving mad to run XP on a new machine, and If you want to use memory over 4gb you have to go 64 bit.

Go Win8 64 bit.


PS XP was a great operating system unlike Vista, but its time to move on. Win 7 wins on XP hands down for instance in pretty much every way.

I am not sure if there are drivers for the OP's computer and interface, for Windows 8 - not sure for Windows 7, either.  In either case, he needs to do some homework checking that out prior to moving to either.


And +1 for moving off of XP - he has a nice quad-core system now that can run 64-bit.  Memory is cheap.


Bob Bone

Alex, if your profile pic is the Fawlty Towers flavor of John Cleese (one episode the sign said Farty Towels), then that ROCKS.

Bob Bone

moffdnb


Indeed yes but curious.  Why all those xtra GBs on disk space?

I'd love to chop it down even further but will leave well enough alone if needs be.  ;>

And how does a bigger program load faster?  

MS has been moving toward having a modern OS for some time. Older versions basically put as much into memory (and swap file) as possible at boot time, so that whatever the OS was called upon to do it was ready. That strategy results in slow boots, and heavy memory demand, when many services were just taking up memory waiting to be called. Linux etc. have been using a core program with daemons/services that load quickly when needed for a long time. Microsoft has begun to see the light, and other windows applications are following the same strategy.

So a lot of the code for later versions of windows does not load at startup, although it still takes up space on the hard drive.