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.  ;>

One of the things Vista and Win7 do is when installed they unpack and put on the drive a whole bunch of stuff that may not be enabled by default (e.g. the tablet PC stuff, assorted games, telnet client, drivers, all kinds of stuff). In earlier versions of Windows you had to use the install disk to install stuff later if you found you wanted/needed it. With Vista and 7 you just tell Windows to enable it and it does.


It does take up a very few gigs of hard drive, but means you very, very rarely need the install disk again.


My personal view is that XP Pro was very good, but post service-pack 1 Vista 64bit was/is better in many ways (not least the aero interface, which is handled by the processor on the grahics card, not the cpu, hence it's smooth, fast and no noticable drain on cpu resources). 7 has much in common with Vista, but feels smoother and uses fewer resources. I wouldn't even contemplate going back to XP.


If you ever want to use solid state drives you need Win7 or 8 (no TRIM in earlier versions of Windows).

There are "guides" to stripping stuff out of 7 around on the web, but for what you space you save, not to mention unforeseen problems later.... 

 Well I'm one of the lunatics still running XP 32 on a newer machine and X2 runs about 30%-40% better :) than X1 did. I don't think there will be a problem for XP users with X2 until the patch that enable touch screen is up. 

 If you want the best of both worlds you can duel boot XP and 7. I plan to do so in the near future, I held out upgrading from win 98se until XP service pack1 was out. I plan to cling on to my XP installation for a long time to come.

I think the major take-home point to be made concerning XP is, it's just fine if the setup on it (Sonar, plugins, drivers) stays the same - meaning relatively stable. You could just disconnect that PC from the Internet, refrain from adding new devices and plugin-ins, and be assured the thing would run forever.

Unfortunately, the moment something is added to the XP setup, the risk is run that something will break. Granted, most plugins available,  and most existing interfaces available will work. As time goes by, however, newer products won't bother with XP compatibility specifics, and this could be a problem.

How stable would one's XP setup be, and how much of a problem will it be if something newer doesn't work out on it - these are the factors that weigh on that decision.

My personal choice would be only to keep XP as long as I had viable older hardware and I didn't plan on adding much to it at all in the future.  Newer hardware has already been shipped with Win 7 for some years now and it's quite acceptable. I wish I could comment on Win 8, but I really don't plan on buying it other than a new PC purchase, or have a good reason to do development work on it.

The one thing I must say on this subject is that last year I changed from a Pentium-D machine running XP32 to a customised DAW machine from Scan with Win7-64 and an i7-950. The difference in performance has been like upgrading from a milk float to a formula 1 racing car. I'm not joking.

To illustrate, I use FM8 which by default sets its polyphony to 8 notes. The maximum it can go to is 64, but this caused the Pentium-D to 'max out'. On the i7 however it makes almost no difference and it can easily handle several (don't know how many in all) instances of it.

Well here is a reall kicker.  Microsoft has a deal right now to upgrade from XP etc. to Win 8 Pro for $39.99.  I ran their 'win8 testing compatibility' app, and all my important hardware (video, DA card, midi interface) are all supported in Win8.  this deal is a short time thing, so that "s-e-e-m-s" like a good plan. 

I am a recording engineer/singer-songwriter.  Some of my stuff I recorded of myself using X1 is out on www.fflynet.net/greg_graves.  I love music; I hate screwing with computers ... other than turning them on and having them do exactly what I want them to with no f-ing backtalk.

I think a lot of us feel the same, but it's something you have to deal with in the modern world.

It could be argued that setting up a computer is in many ways a LOT easier than aligning & maintaining a 24 track tape deck 24/7/365

The pc is our new tape machine - it would be churlish to think you can avoid all setting up/maintenance

There is some learning curve with Windows 8 (weeping and gnashing of teeth, mostly).  Win 7 is quite stable, will remain serviced for quite some time, and is an easy transition to functionally coming from XP.

Win 8 works fine with all of my software and hardware, but I did my homework on that first.  The biggest thing with Windows 8 for me is just dealing with the whole active tiles thing with their new user interface.  I just bypass it and go to the desktop, with most of my common applications pinned to the task bar.

In Windows 8, since there is no longer a start menu, you can get to your applications by hitting the Windows key, then just start typing the name of the application you want to run, and it will automatically present search results.  From there, you can decide if you want to just run it, or you can pin it to the task bar, or you can make it an active tile and find it there.

I do not know of any major performance benefits or costs between Win 7 and Win 8, so choose based on homework results for drivers and such, and choose based on a sense of how you will like dealing with the changes that Windows 8 brings.

Compared to XP, Windows 7 is like a race car versus a bicycle.  Stable at speed and a joy to drive, versus getting passed by everything and wondering if you will fall off at the next turn.  (And I REALLY was a die-hard XP fan).

Bob Bone

The transition from XP to Win 7 was widely lauded as a significant change, but for the average user, I think the transition was fairly easy.

7 to 8, from what I can gather, is again relatively easy once you've disabled Metro

Metro pretty much blows - in my opinion, but it is so easy to bypass and ignore that I didn't let it get in my way at all, and the the rest of Windows 8 is fine.

I think it takes more time to get to applications than using the Start Menu approach, as a desktop user, particularly for the lesser used ones.

Bob Bone

Well here is a reall kicker.  Microsoft has a deal right now to upgrade from XP etc. to Win 8 Pro for $39.99.  I ran their 'win8 testing compatibility' app, and all my important hardware (video, DA card, 

Wait a bit more and they will pay you $39.99 just to install it. 


Seriously, MS is 'afraid' - they see Apple and it's AppStore fleecing everybody in sight and figured they'd better do something fast before they become a non-entity. Win 8 is that frantic effort.