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Optimizing a dedicated audio workstation

Posted by Paul_A on May 14, 2008 at 20:41:56:
I have a computer that is dedicated to music / midi and nothing else. The audio related functions can be very demanding of throughput speed, so I have gone out of my way to optimize everything that I can. My sampled piano, Ivory, reads its samples directly from the hard drive as I play. To avoid any dropouts, I put the samples on a separate hard drive used only to store those samples.

I haven't connected the computer to the internet or installed anything that I don't need for music--no printer drivers, no anti-virus, I never set up outlook express or anything else that might poll the operating system. The video card is set to 16 bit color which redraws the screen faster than 24 bit color. I also disabled any Windows services that weren't needed. I've heard that Norton can be hard to remove; it can leave traces even after a disk has been reformatted. I've heard it suggested that to fully remove all traces of Norton, you should repartition the hard drive a few times and then reformat it.

I'm sure that this all sounds draconian, and I'm also sure that it's more than you need to clean things up and get up and running again, but if you have problems with audio drop-outs or hangs, you might want to strip down your system to the bare essentials. The link below has a few tips for speeding up an audio computer, and there are better resources for this sort of thing somwhere on line.