john clarity

Power management themes, WiFi monitors, System Restore, scheduled updates or backups, screen savers... anything that uses resourses or might interfere with recording.

I use to sort processes by memory usage and shut down anything that didn't absolutely need to be running, but after reading the Live 5 Performance test results on the Ableton forum I built-up an AMD-based PC and a lot of these tricks became less critical. Still, I'm only a hobbyist.

1&2 ,

I don't know, I've really never had a Windows system that I would consider unstable, and that's from running DOS, to Windows 3.0 to 95 to 98 1&2 to ME, Win2K and XP.

It all depends on the setup and what you have running in the background. If the program installs were done correctly, with virus protection turned off and all other programs closed as requested, there were generally no problems. Then, consistent maintenance, defrags & so on, would allow the machines to run just fine. You would have to power down regularly too. Really, the only real problem I had was a failure to shut down problem with Windows 98 and that was eliminated by installing a fix.

One thing that lots of people fail to take into consideration is the fact that most, not all but most, of the macs that were used for music were dedicated to that process while the Windows systems were used for everything including surfing the net. All the other stuff running on the computer and in the background were what the problems were, not the OS.

Take the Windows machine, strip all the crap off and tweak for music production and it will be stable.