Downgrade from Windows 7 to XP?

Refering to my previous posts concerning various and continual problems with soundcards, latency, vst-plugins etc…
I thought that my problems,  which I now have struggled with for six months after I switch to work on my new DAW with Windows 7 x64/Audition 3.01 last spring, were solved, but no, no….

Now I only see two options. Downgrade to XP pro 32bit, and if that doesn’t help, start to use Cubase instead of Audition.
But I’ll try the downgradetoxp- option first.

My question is:

Do you have any tips & tricks & advices when you do a XP pro 32bit installation on a new, clean hard-drive, and the DAW will be used only for working with Audition 3.01. Nothing else.

I now have two WD Velociraptors in the machine. One new clean 150 Gb for programs, and one 450 Gb for audio (with some previous sessions recorded with the Windows 7 x64 setup)
8 G:s  of RAM ( I know I can only use 3 in XP), Intel Core I7 870 2.93 G 8M processor,  AMD/ATI  HD5770 Graphics card and a Asus P7P55D-E motherboard.

Cheers!

Peter

One other option might be to downgrade from the 64 bit version of Windows 7 to the 32 bit version.

James.

James, yes, that is of course an option. The main reason why I'm planning to downgrade to XP, is the phrase I've heard or read somewhere:"Adobe Audition 3 is designed and written for Windows XP".
But perhaps it's the BITS that are significant in this context..I really don't know.

Hmmm.... how about it's not a downgrade!

Why not combine the good parts of 2 items and avoid the trouble of both ? It's so easy to install a second OS on any system and use the one that is best for a particular application - certainly XP for AA. Apart from the pain of selecting the correct OS at start or waiting for the other OS at a change, there is rarely a problem at all. I am not yet on W7 but I can select between DOS (yes sometimes of help also), Win2000, and XP (twice - one of them as a spare in case of troubles). There is apce left for a future W7 or W8 also. The current prices of Harddisks justify to have a first disk of 100 ... 200 GB for the OS only and another bigger one containing the DATA. Is there anything wrong with my idea ?

Buy your big disks now, before the shortage caused by the flooding of disk factories in Thailand starts to bite!

Paul

Bert,

yes, that's propably not a bad idea at all, but I'm starting to be totally paranoid about any possibly conflicts caused by several o.s:s, programs, drivers and other devices on the same computer. I have struggled with these problems for years, so now I want a "totally clean" computer with nothing else than Audition 3.01 and a soundcard. I have two older XP-computers that I can use for everything else I need to do than making music.

In my previous post I asked for tips, tricks and advices when you install XP for the first time. I ask this, because I have never before installed XP on a clean computer. I have always purchased computers with XP allready installed.
No one has answered this question, so propably there's nothing essential you can do? I mean, should you just let Windows install everything, like windows audio, messenger, outlook, netmeeting, media-player bla-bla....= all that crap that you wont need? And after that try to disable everything?

Paul, good idea! A cuople of 4 Tb external discs will keep me floating for a while.


P.   

In my previous post I asked for tips, tricks and advices when you install XP for the first time. I ask this, because I have never before installed XP on a clean computer. I have always purchased computers with XP allready installed.
No one has answered this question, so propably there's nothing essential you can do? I mean, should you just let Windows install everything, like windows audio, messenger, outlook, netmeeting, media-player bla-bla....= all that crap that you wont need? And after that try to disable everything?

Here is a link to a good set of tweaks to XP for DAW work - http://www.softwareaudioconsole.com/Tweaking_Windows_XP.htm

Yes Peter, I feel sitting in the same boat with you. I am sorry not to have followed the full history of your threat. For all the recording business, it's best to have a PC bare with no other SW than XP and AA and the drivers needed. It's exactly the point where you best install the OS by yourself to take care that no "bonus material" and other unwanted stuff is on your machine who eats up system power. Setting up XP from scratch is no big problem, even less since you can keep your present insrallation as a spare, assuming you have a number of partitions.

I also use 2 older PC's strictly for recording only. They have XP and the SPs up to 3 installed, but have never been attached to the web just for that reason. You may even disable a lot of services that are not needed beyond those in the paper proposed by Eric. The PC I spoke about is my "main machine" which has a number of OS's on it. It's never used for recording but only for postprocessing where any going wrong may be rectified.
 
There is an additional point that is not very easy to come along with completely. It's the setup of the many pages of parameters in AA itself. Although the basic setup has reasonable defaults, fine tuning is a very delicate labour and it is sometimes tricky to understand the meaning of a particular parameter, and its influence on the behaviour. I have done a number of experiments and put the results to the forum some years ago, but I am still not convinced that my set is fully optimized. This might be a point of further discussion inviting other members.

I suggest that anyone wanting to dual boot look into the situation carefully first. I believe it is officially not possible to install WinXP with Win7. It makes a big mess with the disk boot sectors that cannot be undone by deleting and reformatting and attempting to start over. Win7 attempts to combine all different Windows systems, including different Win7 installations, on one or multiple hard drives, into one amalgamated freak creature that, like most radiation mutations, cannot live.

If you can get it to work, it probably will not be by the routes previously used. I think that is why the XP in a Windows 7 box feature was developed.

Eric, thanks for the link! Very interesting stuff.

Bert, do you refer to the settings in Auditions "Preferences" when you talk about setting parameters? I hope you are, because otherwise there is some "parameter-settings place" for Audition that I never have detected. But that's anyway a very good suggestion for a discussion.
The settings are a big questionmark for me too. It's exactly like you say. The influence on the behaviour is very difficult to understand and discover.
I couldn't find your previous post about this topic. Can you copy it here, or shall we start a new discussion?

Peter

I think that is why the XP in a Windows 7 box feature was developed.

Windows 7 "XP mode" is merely a licence to use a pre-installed version of XP in a copy of the long-established (and free) Virtual PC program - plus a little trickery to show virtualised windows at the application level, which is new to Virtual PC but not to some other virtualisation systems.

Paul

Yes, but it is "instead of" a dual boot Win7/WinXP system. According to what I read from MS, that isn't supposed to be possible. Maybe someone knows how, but there are many post from people who have tried and failed ... and tend to regret the resulting mess. I'm just warning that people should not go into it blind, thinking they can do what they've does with previous versions of the OS.

Yes Peter, it is preferences what I mean by settings, but also the page about hardware. I will check to find my old post and repeat it. With respect to W7 I have to admit that I have no personal experience about running XP and W7 as a dual boot. I refer to one of the specialists on IT at my former university that confirmed that possibility. Yet, even specialists may be wrong ? ! But I still urge to use (even a cheap secondhand - single core > 2 GHz) PC as a standalone recording PC with XP only.

Now this is my old post from June 23, 2008 repeated. Although these settings refer to AA1.0 I think they may be taken as a guide for AA3 as well. Anyway I would be happy to see a new discussion started about this item.


Apart from my proposal to use a dedicated machine that works almost with AA only (which got little response) I forgot to mention some changes I made in the settings part of AA. I know this is basically dependent on the type of sound card also, but as an example, I mention the settings I found useful. Although my initial problem was loss of sync between the tracks, I believe the problems originate at the same corner which is task switching of the OS. Beyond that I fully coincide with Steve.

My settings respect the following points: (as already mentioned under "Sync problem in multitrack recording, Jan. 2008)

* Disable a big number of services such as indexing, messaging ... in the OS (+)
* Remove (not only disable) any PCI-cards except for the recording interface and video (in my systems, there is only 1 PCI slot occupied). May be you have even               
  to select this slot by try and error.
* Disable disk caching (+) but make sure DMA is ON
* Cleaning up temp-files and other debris and defragment disk before work (+)
* Clean up registry
* In /adobe/settings/multitrack:    increase rec. Buffers       10 -> 20 (+ ?)
   Priority background mix    2 -> 20 (+ ?)
   Hook no corrections
   Open order         Rec,Play (+ ?)
   Start order          Rec,Play (+ ?)
* In /adobe/settings/system:    increase rec. Buffer length   8192 -> 16384 (+ ?)
* Increase priority for AA to high (must be done at every start !) (+)

(+)  definitely confirmed to help
(+ ?) improvement observed, optimum value not confirmed

I hope this gets you one step further.

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