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Alejandro · Location: Venezuela

Hello Everyone.
I'm having a little problem with my setup, and, as I've been reading, you fellas know the mojo.

(LONG TEXT AHEAD)

Objective: Tweak and fine tune my pc in order to get the
best posible CoolEditPro

My setup for CoolEdit Pro 2.0:

Compaq Presario 5VW280, AMD Athlon 900MHz, 3?? MB RAM (no joke, can't remember)
Win2000, SP3, DirectX9, VIA Motherboard or chipset (don't know about this too much)
VIA Hyperion 4in1446vp6 "4in 1" drivers updated.
40GB Maxtor HD, 3 partitions: 10gbNTFS(Boot, Win2k), 10gbFAT32(audio files), 20gbFAT32(temp files)
Services not used were set to manual or disabled.(Administrative tools)
All fancy sounds disabled, power issues disabled, no screensaver,
16bit color depth, Tweak UI installed and used. Smile

SoundBlaster5.1LiveMP3 (drivers up to date)
NVIDIA Card 8MB (Latest detonator update downloaded)
Dxr3 Decoder Card (Creative Alpha drivers for the card up to date
also tried Hollywood Plus (Thanks Purpleman!)

So far, so good.

Did a fresh install of Win2000 pressing F5 so
i could set the whole thing up like "Standart PC" and stuff.
Everything went ok until I installed the Dxr3 Decoder Card Drivers, the
system froze showing a quite scary blue screen with pretty little white
letters.

(Thanks: "Optimizing Windows 2000 and Windows XP for Audio" Guide, PDF Format
article last updated 17 March 2002, Daniel Keller, TASCAM Sr. Product Specialist)

So, to sum up, I have to use Win2000/ACPI mode in order to keep things
running "smoothly" (Audio PC setup + DVD Playback).
"Standart PC" setup works until the Dxr3 Creative card's drivers are installed
and a restart is made, then the crash.
(Blue screen/little white letters upper left side of the screen) :-
I wonder if a correctly tweaked "WinXP/Standart PC" setup would be even more
eficient than the current one I have, having in mind the CPU speed (800Mhz), and that
new NTFS v5.1. (Thanks: http://ghost.radified.com/)

***

Every little hint will be greatly appreciated,
thanks everyone for your patience and my poor english.

From Venezuela:
Alejandro B.
Cool Edit Pro 2.0 user (newbie).

djwayne · Location: USA

I've been re-setting up my system and it works great for me.

256 RAM, but I may increase this, but it works okay for now.

60G Maxtor with 3 partitions, 11G, 23G, 23G , with Windows Me OS

10G Maxtor, no partitions, with Windows '98, (to work with old Opcode
Vision 2.5 Sequencing software and midi interfaces.)

900 Atholon chip

Audiophile 2496 Sound Card

Acer CDRW

Studio Files software for organizing song information

Cool Edit 2000 with Studio Plug-In, which I may upgrade later.

CD Trustee to keep track of CD's

Adaptec CD Creator 4.02 ( I may add the Real One burner/player ,as I've had good luck with it, and some streams from the internet, required it)

I use a Mackie 24x8x2 mixing board to pre-mix music before it goes into Cool Edit 2000, giving me many options, which works for me at the present time.

I would also highly recommend backing up any music or programs to CD, in the event of a system crash. I used two hard drives, in the event one gets hacked, a virus, or other software problem, the two are isolated from each other, and downtime can be kept to a minimum. I've been working on setting it up this way for awhile, and I really like it.

Yesterday, I completely reformatted and reset-up my entire system, to remove about 6G's worth of unused programs that were conflicting with the programs I really like. Now it's all running as solid as a rock. The whole point of slimming my system down is to have less software conflict problems as possible, which is extremely important for the Visions Sequencing program to work properly. It also has to be installed with nothing later than Windows 98, as there are NO updates available for newer systems for Windows 98SE and beyond. It's a great program when it's working properly, but it's very touchy, if it's not set-up right.

I highly recommend the Audiophile 2496 Sound card, as it's working great for me. No pops, hums, buzzes, or clicks, and works very well with Cool Edit, and Visions. I'm very pleased with the quality of the recordings I'm getting.

I recently got the Studio Files studio management program to keep track of misc. notes about songs, such as sequencer settings, lyrics, instruments used, comments, ect, ect. It's a great looking, easy to use program that seems to run well so far. It's available at hitsquad.com for a 30 day demo. License is only $33.00.

The CD Trustee program works well, it keeps track, and displays CD info, which is a must for large cd collections. I may even start using it to keep track and organize data cd's, as well as music CD's, as I'm planning on saving session files to data cdr's for back-up.

The Cool Edit Program works very well in conjunction with all the other programs, and is also a great management tool for storage of music, or recording sesssions. Having recording, editing, and file conversion, analizing programs, all in one program is great, once you learn how to use it. I also recommend spending some time, setting up your colors on the graph, as you can make the charts, very easy to read, and easy on the eyes with greys and black or dark blue color combinations. Toning down the brightness of the colors on the screen makes it much easier on the eyes for extended periods of time.

Hope this helps !!