silent running

One for the IT experts I think...

I use my PC for general stuff, internet, word-processing, itunes, scanning, printing, burning CDs etc. But I also have recently started using it for 'professional' music creation also, using an audiophile quality soundcard and I/O ports, tons of different pro software etc. Now it seems that the two different uses to which I put my PC are clashing, even in Windows XP. At the very least, the sound management software is slowing down the rest of the computer under normal use e.g. booting up, and the normal XP processes that are always running in the background, when I'm doing some heavy multitasking, are glitching my audio processing when it should be taking top priority.

So I thought of just getting another PC strictly for audio use, but I don't have the desk space for the extra hardware and I don't want to share the mouse/keyboard/screen across two PCs. The question is then, can I dual boot with Windows XP vs. Windows XP? It seems perfectly straightforward to run say Windows 98 vs. Windows XP, but I can't find any mention anywhere of people running two instances of the SAME operating system. I'd be doing it basically to avoid any cross-contamination of data or operating system, and also so I make the heavyeight audio processing software and hardware invisible to my 'everyday' XP insall and just run it on its own on a totally separate OS.

Any advice on this? Cheers!

silent running

Thanks for moving the thread for me...oops didn't realise there was a dedicated computer forum!

Markus

I'm pretty sure you can an XP and XP dual boot setup. I think as part of the install process you can specify a new directory where XP will be installed on the existing disk, and you should certainly be able to specify an install to a different partition or disk.

Kieran_Burns

iTrader: (1)

Can't you just use two accounts?

mike1210

you can dual boot with one hard drive but I couldn't stress enough that youd need to make 2 partitions to make it work well, one install on one partition and one install on the other, you can also make different hardware profiles in control panel > system > hardware and hardware profiles

also can you limit what comes on, on startup (msconfig) and only start the heavy duty stuff if you need to, id try that and see how it runs before trying anything else

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Bare in mind that installing another copy of Windows XP will mean installing all the Service Packs and Patches from scratch. I'd go with what's been suggested by others first. In regards to the slow down. This may mean a RAM or CPU upgrade maybe required to get that lot running nicely.

ru'

I'd say go for it, but as above make sure you've got a second partition/disk to install it on. Just boot from the XP CD and go for a new install, then point it to the new partition/disk. It will take care of the boot menu etc. to give you the choice of OS on start-up.

Ideally if you have a second drive, you can use this for the second copy of XP, and use the first drive for your swap file etc.

I don't think that using user accounts or profiles etc. will give you as much 'freedom' as a dedicated install for music.

There's no problem with authorising the second copy either.

Patching it up to date shouldn't be too much of a problem, but make sure you have a firewall or something running before connecting to the 'net before it's fully patched.

The Rig

iTrader: (13)

i wont go into the waffle of dual booting, all can be found via google etc, but i would suggest, if its just SOFTWARE you need to be used/changed to try a program called VMWARE, very good for software, you can have all sorts of O/S installed, its expensive to buy, but can be "borrowed" quite easily, but f you require hardware, its not so good, apart from the norm stuff, but if you need extra hardware, its hard to get this seen via windows.

dual boot is a doddle, even for novices, google will reveal all, xp vs xp no problem, dual boot is just that !!

bob269

You could install 100 copies of xp but only 1 would ever run at once, why would this put strain on the ram/cpu ?

mike1210

I believe he meant that if the new sound packages running have put a strain on the PC in general, and that if the PC struggles to run them, a RAM upgrade or CPU upgrade would be required to make the most out of them

jpor

iTrader: (1)

That is indeed what I meant.

I would look at the current hardware spec first. At a guess the guy is trying to run all of this on a P4 1.8Ghz with 256MB RAM. Which in lay mans terms would mean it's well underpowered for what he is trying to acheive. So a RAM upgrade would be the first step to getting things running a little smoothly.

silent running

Many thanks for all the replies, much appreciated. Perhaps I need to add a little more background - I do regular reinstallations of Windows from scratch every year or two, just to clear out the crap that accumulates, and I do try and keep startup/background program to the minimum necessary. I used to be pretty good at this stuff when I was working in DOS and Win 95 years ago (I remember people saying that they wouldn't move across to the new-fangled Win 95 because Win 3.x was all the OS they'd ever need LOL) but as Windows has got ever more 'user-friendly' and trickier to get into I've kind of given up on trying to keep up with how to tweak and I'm just happy for it to work.

Anyway, spec is an Athlon XP2600+, 768 Mb of DDR running at 333 MHz, 120 Gb HDD, a seriously understressed GeForce FX5200 video card and two lots of audio hardware - the NVIDIA on-board bog standard audio and my EMU pro card. So not cutting edge, but pretty good a couple of years ago when I built it and still OK now. I was always planning to wipe the whole drive and run each OS on a separate partition.

The reason why I'm keener on much greater separation beyond just separate accounts etc is because on top of the heavyweight audio drivers that get loaded on, a lot of the software is resource-hungry and full of anti-piracy measures incl. hardware and software 'dongles' etc. It's just easier to not have to worry about Norton scheduling AV scans, Windows Update running in the background the whole time, and dozens of other lurking programs I can't even name off the top of my head, but we all know they are there and it's just a pain in the **** to have to keep shutting them off or prevent from running in the first place, because sometimes they can be useful.

I am about to do a memory upgrade anyway, perhaps swap out my 256 DIMM for a 1 gig job, and I'm pretty sure my BIOS will handle what speed it runs at. I know at the moment the DDR is running at 333Mhz, double the FSB frequency of 166MHz. Will I be able to run faster memory than this (e.g. 200Mhz FSB / 400MHz DDR) or am I stuck because the FSB freq is tied to the processor's rate?

Cheers!

PS just downloaded a copy of Windows Vista beta and thought I might give that a go as well, just to make things a little more complicated. Is it possible to triple boot?

jowl

In your situation I would avoid Vista at the moment. You'll have driver issues I'm sure and your hardware isn't really up to spec.

I would think about getting another drive and have a WInXP on both drives.

jpor

iTrader: (1)

RAM wise it doesn't matter if you get a higher rated RAM module. The module will run at the speed of the machine. Just of a matter of interest. You're board doesn't support Dual-band Memory? If it does, buying 2x 512 or 2x 1GB Sticks will allow you to run in 128-bit mode for the RAM. Which will definately improve things.

silent running

OK...I'll leave Vista on the back burner for the moment, never thought of running XP on two separate drives, but it's an idea, especially seeing how cheap they are at the moment.

My motherboard will support a 200MHz FSB but at present it's running at 166, presumably because it works well with the Athlon and the 333Mhz DDR. It does run dual channel and at the moment it's a 512 in one slot and 256 in the other. My thinking is that the best thing to do at the moment is to keep the 512 in there and swap the 256 for another (333) Mhz 512 or a 1 gig, depending on what's the best value right now.

silent running

Yeah what's the thing with dual core then? Technology really has largely passed me by in the last few years. Presumably I'll need a dual core motherboard, whack two identical processors in it and double the working speed? Is this the new way forward? One thing I have noticed is that processor speeds seemed to have basically stalled for a couple of years now...the decade before, speeds were ramping up faster than you could spec a new PC just about (thinking back to my cutting edge 90 MHz Pentium LOL)

mike1210

jowl

Dual core is not dual processor, Silent running.

The AMD Althlon 64 chips have some dual core varietys - basically 2 cores in a single processor running at the same speed. So one core would handle, say audio/video processing, leaving the other core free for whatever else you want to do...watching DVD's / playing games / Internet ect

The current (dual core) Socket 939 Athlons start about £150 + VAT for dual core. Motherboards are cheap enough too.

If I were going dual-core now (And I intend to) I'd wait a couple of months and look at the Intel Core2 duo - and that's coming from an AMD fan!

jpor

iTrader: (1)

Yep.. relunctantly I have to agree there. The new AM2 socket and chips AMD are planning to bring out that use the newer DDR-2 RAM don't compare to the Intel offereing. But you will be still paying a premium for the INTEL chip.