Originally posted by thedug:
My friend just got his record mastered here in Austin that the mastering engineer was ranting about how XP was not the way to go and that 2000 was the only choice for the mastering pros.

I think Howy Wienberg's name came up as a 2000 advocate.

Any comments. I have found XP to be more stable and have been audio support. ACPI is also a nice advantage, more IRQs!

d./

After building many, and running with all the Windows versions, I think hands down XP is the way to go.

BUT....you NEED to tweak out a few of the services and unwarranted items to get the most out of it. See the "opus" site for fairly decent a guide and don't get overly aggressive.

Its also best to do a fresh install of XP.

Only word of caution I have is, if you have the first version of XP, not SP1a, then unless you are using firewire, I would avoid the temptation to use the SP1a download if using an older computer, specifically one with an IBM deskstar drive. I do not know why, but many times the installation of the SP1a download will cause the computer to take forever to boot back up everytime you shut it off. The only solution for this I've found is to uninstall the SP1a update and revert back to XP.

Note this does not happen all the time, but I've had 2 computers now with Deskstar drives that exhibited this problem.

As far as the tweaking guide. I was reading MUSICXp.net and they changed their story in regards to services say that disabling services will have a negliable effect.

The opus guide still recommends to turn off extra servics.

Just curious.

d/

2000 is good, and XP is finally gooder.

:D

I dislike all MS products in the early stages, and always wait for the service packs before exposing my clients to a new product. XP has some 50 million lines of code, making it 10x the size of Linux, and still not as stable.

That said, XP has better USB support. It likes lots of RAM. 256mb is absolute entry level, IMO. The OS itself will consume the first 128mb or more.

XP likes new hardware. Main stream hardware. Look at the Hardware Compatibility List, and make sure your gear is listed. If running DAW stuff, check with the manufacturer. They will tell you if certain motherboards or chipsets are problematic with their hardware.

Win2000 / SP4 works well, but is at end of life. XP will be around until 2004 when the next release of Whatever comes along. I suspect MS and the hardware folks will be trying to move us all to 64 bit.

Yawn.

Mom sez, "Just say no, to one-dot-oh".

Are there any 200 advocates out there? I'd really like to hear what you have to say.

d./

I have to say how can a mastering engineer tell the difference on stability with XP vs 2000?

Mastering engineers should be using all outboard external analog equipment rather than computer.

At least the good ones do! Try and convert Bob Ludwig to all computer based mastering! lol

There's not going to be any more stability for mastering in regards to 2000 vs XP.

Yes, turning off the services greatly helps in XP with the start up and shut down time. Plus it allows the machine to not have any interupted tasks when recording. Also it enables more resources as it's not polling the network for anything.

Since my machine is hooked up to a network for file sharing only I turn off all the major networking components/services so that it only looks at it when activated!

I highly recommend trimming XP services down to a bare minimum. You only need 5 services to be on for nothing but audio work at all...even for gaming!

Longhorn is the next OS, at least that is it's code name for now. Not sure what's up with that at the present moment but that's the OS that's going to support the PCI Express protocol and other improvements such as SATA and so forth.

Opus :D

Originally posted by Opus2000:
... but that's the OS that's going to support the PCI Express protocol and other improvements such as SATA and so forth.

What is PCI Expres protocol and SATA?