From deke@dekethegeek.com Fri Jan 17 08:28:13 2003
Subject:Building a stable soft synth PC (was - RE: B4 users...)

< appearing in the middle of my set... "Ladies and Gentlemen, please
excuse me for three minutes as I have to restart my computer...">>

Well, as a friend of mine (who was until recently pretty anti-M$) on another list is fond of saying... Although they have had their ups and downs, I think M$ got it right on this one (speaking of XP). I have a little more experience fixing PC's than most people I know, so I am not as easily tempted by saying something like "this M$ crap sucks...". In point of fact I use most flavors of Linux from time to time, and I still prefer using XP as my main OS, with 2000 Pro on the laptop for lower overhead.

Something that a lot of people don't take into consideration before writing off Windows is the fact that there are soooooo many different types and flavors of hardware out there to install Windows on. Compare that to the Mac scenario... they have only a finite number of products and platforms to support. From a stability standpoint this makes things tremendously easier for Apple, and quite a bit tougher for M$, but despite these hurdles Windows is still the number 1 OS in existence. Also, we (musicians) are attempting to get low latency and lightning fast performance out of our computers in order to run soft-synths like B4, EVB3, etc.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people making is trying to use an existing install of Windows for their music production, or even for gaming or desktop use. It's like a car... you can't just go buy a Camaro and expect to run with the big boys on the NASCAR circuit... it just won't happen. The reason is that the car (or PC in our example) was built with a specific purpose in mind, and it does that job well enough for the average consumer, but we need to set it up specifically for our special purposes. In my next message I will go through a checklist of things to do to make sure it will work well...

Deke The Geek