How can I best optimise/tweak a poor computer for use as a DAW?

[ambient]

I have an old Acer Aspire 3680 laptop with 2G of RAM and a less than stellar processor.

 

I currently use Ubuntu and it runs fine for day to day stuff but I want to start messing around with audio (nothing too serious obviously).

 

The plan is to nuke it and dual-boot Win XP (for audio only) and Ubuntu (for web etc). I'm gonna use Reaper.

 

I know this is a FAR from optimal situation but I'd like to get it running the best I can so I can play around a bit.

 

 

Do you have any tips/tweaks for maximizing performance in Windows XP....with an old and slow machine?

 

I found this guide which seems pretty helpful - is it sound advice?

 

Am I completely wasting my time?

 

 

 

I'm not expecting miracles, just something to tide me over until I can get a proper machine together.

[t_e_l_e]

my desktop pc i use at home for all my mixing stuff is 6 years old, only 1GB ram and one of the first generation athlon64x2 cpus in it.

i can easily run cubase projects with 30+ tracks, heavy vst plugin usage aso. yes there are limits, but there are also things to work around them.

 

but first things first

you definitely need an external sound interface with ASIO drivers. these interfaces take a lot of the work away from the cpu and do it inside the interface. especially multiple tracks and vst aso. i can't run any of my projects with the internal sound interface i have in my computer.

 

if usb or firewire, what budget you have, how many inputs/outputs you need is up to you. the smallest m-audio usb2.0 interface will work for basic stuff, but investing a little more there is always a good choice.

 

i use a presonus inspire 1394 firewire interface, its a bit older, still available, can be stacked together up to four cards, with a total of 16 inputs. we have two and record eight mics simultaneously without any probs.

there are others out there, with same or better or lesser functionality

have a look at those first

 

second when you have an interface with ASIO drivers, latency is your friend

yep everybody wants zero latency blahblah blah, but most of them do not understand what really is important

ASIO interfaces assure you a fixed latency, which means it will always be guaranteed 5ms or 10ms or whatever you set it.

normal sound cards do not assure you any latency, it is as good as it gets, so sometimes it can be 1ms but when the computer gets busy while you are tracking it can go up to 50 or 500ms. this makes the troubles.

 

if you set the latency e.g. to 20ms it means, a playback will start 20ms after you pressed the play button, but everything is in sync correctly.

giving your computer some time (latency) helps him to compute all data needed to make great results coming out of your speakers. if you shorten this time, it will not have enough resources and then it will produce cracks and stuff, cause it was not fast enough to compute all information.

 

you get the same issues with faster modern computers as well if you are not careful about how you use your resources. on a slower computer increasing the latency with a good ASIO interface can make it still an powerful audio production machine

 

for sure you should have good speakers attached to your interface and there is a ton of stuff which comes next, but this is it for the start

[daklander]

Here's a post with a list of windows audio tweaks.

 

I did fine with an old Athlon Tbird and a gig of memory using a Soundblaster Live audio card. My personal recording was never too plug in heavy and no more than 12 tracks. I did, however, use that machine for several mixing projects with up to 25 tracks and it handled that fine too. At the time I was using n-Track Studio.

So, it's going to depend a lot on which plugins you're going to use and how many, more than anything else.

[WRGKMC]

get some extra memory and max it out for 2 megs. Its got a usb 2.0 port so you should be good with a USB interface.

Its got a card slot too so you can probibly run a Firewire interface with a PCIMIA card if you want.

 

Big problem with laptops is the hard drive. You only have one and you cant run a separate drive for wave files like you can with a PC.

What happens is you work the heads really hard with a single drive and the OS bogs down because of the audio file sizes.

You "cannot" record to a partition of the main drive either. Your best off getting an external drive but even there you're dumping files

on there through a USB or Firewire port and those communication ports bog the read and write speed way down. What I'd do

is install an exrteremly basic OS, write to the C Drive then save the projects manually to the external drive and keep no more than

one multitrack recording on the C Drive at a time.

 

The other big hardware item will be you Processor speed. It an Intel Celeron 1.73G which rarely as fast as that. (celerons are pentiums that

fail to process as fast as they should but good enough to work for normal word processing stuff). They can fail badly for intense audio work

so you want to use a DAW program below its maximum ability.

 

The big item you'll need to look at is the DAW program requirements. You wont be able to run the latest programs and plugins.

you can probibly run earley versions of Sonar and Cubase, but programs like sonar 8.5 or X1 will need a minimum CPU processor

of 3G, preferibly dual or quad, and 4G or more memory. That laptop only gets you half way there. theres still plenty of programs that will

work though. you may want to try reaper or digh up a version of sonar, one or two. Look up the computer specs needed for the programs.

 

 

other than that you can go to the Black Viper site and look at optimizing the OS. All you want running is the OS and audio drivers.

No internet, antivirus or bloatware.