Windows XP is great for surfing the web and simple apps, or using as a simple storage server, but it lacks the power in both design and hardware specs for a high-end DAW in 2012.

That is a load of hooey. Dood.

paulo

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk
]

XP is completely unsupported with SONAR X2. Future updates of X2 will not even install on XP so its not worth the trouble of installing IMO.

Hmmmm ! Not quite the "there are no specific reasons why it shouldn't work, but XP is no longer part of our official testing matrix and therefore is not officially supported. " answer that was supplied by Brandon when the XP question was asked before !!

The level of access this forum has to you guys is one of the things I think is great about Cakewalk and I would never want that to change, but it's not really helpful when different CW people give differing answers to the same subject.

Anyone from CW care to comment ?

Comment about what? I think what I said earlier is perfectly clear. 
If you want more technical details  read the Windows 8 SDK here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/hh852363.aspx#Requirements


The Windows SDK can be used to build applications that target the following operating systems:
Windows 8
Windows Server 2012
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2008

With regard to multi-touch support Vista is not even part of the above matrix

Brando

 I just upgraded to Win 7 myself a few weeks ago - lots of software (NI as an example) no longer supporting XP or Vista. 

Yep. That's why I made the plunge at the beginning of this year.


But my old XP machine kept right on rolling till X1 come out. And it still did better than this computer I'm on now (my house PC) Quad core Q6600, 4gb Ram, Realtec using ASIO4ALL. And even when I used my TonePort it didn't help.


The point here is like others are saying;
Design a machine for your Hardware and software.
Use it till it drops!!
Then do it again!!

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

Comment about what? I think what I said earlier is perfectly clear.

His question was about Cakewalk employee's contradicting each others statements.

I'm not saying I agree with Paulo because I didn't see what Brandon said ... but you did completely avoid his question by responding with something irrelevant to his inquiry. I would think you'd jump right on Paulo's question to set him straight or to say, oops, Brandon was mistaken.

Nobody can be perfect 100% of the time. If Brandon gave the impression X2 'might' run on XP even though it's crystal clear Cakewalk does not support it, and it in fact won't run because of a future update, I'm 100% certain Brandon had no intention of trying to cause confusion or be misleading.

I was very aware XP is no longer supported, so I would never even try to run X2 on XP. Why are we even wasting our time with this guys? You want to run XP, stick with X1. Better yet, stick with 8.5!

XP is dead, along with the desktop PC. Windows 8 is Microsoft's transition in to the touchscreen, $.99 cent app world for your home. Life as we know it is going to change very very soon. Whether or not Windows 8 goes the way of Windows ME or Vista (although after about 400GB of updates, Vista is pretty damn good), Windows 9 with all the bugs fixed, and the app/touchscreen technology better tuned, is going to be our future. It will get to a point where there will be no desktop to run a DAW, then Cakewalk will have to completely change Sonar and the way we work.

Thanks,

Bub

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk
]

Comment about what? I think what I said earlier is perfectly clear. 

Yes, what you said was very clear - however this is not what Brandon said Here. That was my point.

Brandon isn't a developer :) Seriously that was posted in August and before we started work on the Win8 specific stuff.
When we say its not officially supported it means that any limitations that may exist may not even be discovered since we aren't testing that OS anymore. 
In this case Brandon simply wasn't aware of the limitations of XP as it related to future development. He wasn't trying to intentionally mislead anyone. Anyone choosing to use an unsupported OS does so at their own risk since an update could break something.

Paulo - no offence, but after reading this, my own conclusion is that I think Brandon was pretty fair in his response - even your answer - "No free lunch then" leads me to believe that you had a fairly clear idea that XP was a dead-end as far as X2 is concerned.
Having said that, several users are reporting success in their own installations of X2 under XP and Vista - so they may be limited in how far they can go in X2 - which may lead them to decide to upgrade at that point to take advantage of the next technology hurdle, or stand pat.
May not be a "Free lunch" - but at least it's an appetizer. 

My beef is that if future updates cannot even be installed on XP then we should have been told BEFORE we took the plunge and bought X2 in the first place.

i wouldn't be surprised if there appears a "workaround" for a non-xp-installing update... but i agree that it should've been made clear(er) that there would be no xp/vista support