Hey everyone, after a grueling local tour I finally scraped enough together to upgrade my DAW. Last night I purchased the following:

Asus Motherboard P6T
Intel i7 Quad Core @ 2.66ghz
6GB OCZ triple channel RAM 1600Mhz
EVGA video card w/ 1GB DDR2 RAM PCI-E (Geforce 9400 GT chip)
OCZ Stealth Xtreme PSU @ 700W

I am moving up to vista 32bit to take advantage of multiple cores. My DAW is ProTools LE 7.4. Plug-ins include Komplete 4, Strike, Waves PowerPack, Ethno Instrument, and Trilogy.

My next upgrade will include ProTools 8.0 and the Digidesign Music Production Toolkit 2.

I currently have a SATA 80GB sytem drive w/ XP and a SATA 300GB HDD in my current PC, I am thinking of backing up my audio drive to free up as much space as possible, and doing a Vista 32bit upgrade from XP on my system drive. Obviously I am looking at updating all my plugins or at least downloading these updates prior to build so they will be ready for Vista 32bit. This PC will not even dream of hitting the internet, except for initial registration of windows and driver updates.

Does anyone see anything wrong with this plan? I would greatly appreciate your feedback.

Before I forget, this OCZ PSU has some good reviews, but a lot of people say its noisy, unfortunately I need to record in the same room with my PC, just vocals and solo instruments though.

Adios a todos!

If you go to the DUC forums on Digidesign.com ,you will see that everyone seems to love Protools 8,so that seems like a no brainer.On the other hand,Vista has been pegged as a power sucking dog,and you will achieve better performance on XP.It does take advantage of multi processors,and PT 7.3 was the first of the PT software upgrades to do this.Protools 8 still supports Windows XP.The only thing you should do is have a dual boot system installed on your drive so that you may keep Vista,and buy a version of XP,or just install XP and foget about Vista.

Every Windows rendition based on the NT kernel does fine with multiple processors and multithreading - which would be every version of Windows from 2000 through the present.

People don't seem to realize that multiple processor motherboards have existed for nearly two decades.

Just to second (or third) what was already said: XP handles multiple processors just fine, and it's already 32-bit. Just like Vista, XP comes in only 2 bit flavors: 32 or 64, so using Vista doesn't give you any advantage over XP in that department. Vista is also much more demanding of your system's resources. On top of that, many programs are still having issues with Vista compatibility. Long story short, I agree that you should at least hang on to XP, either in a dual-boot set-up or, preferably, as your primary OS and forget about Vista entirely. Vista sucks, quite frankly. There's a reason that Microsoft never completely phased out XP.

And I'll wager it's the same reason they're furiously trying to bring Windows 6 to market ASAP....

Thanks for the suggestions, I did a fresh install of XP and updated to SP 3. Also purchased Pro Tools 8. I switched my video card for an ATI chipset since many members in the DUC forum were reporting problems with Nvidia drivers. Currently have two issues keepin me down.......

Don't know about on Winblows, but PT8 on a Mac Pro is about as good as it gets.

You also might try the new Windows 7. Looks like Vista with fewer bugs. Try the release candidate first. Make sure that your software works with it first.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx

Dan

Playing Betatester for MS is not a great way to set up a stable DAW.

Sure, it may have "fewer bugs" than Vista, but MS always programs back doors into their systems, and until it's launched, no one finds out about them until the hackers find them and begin exploiting them.

If you already have a license for XP, get BitTorrent and find the "Tiny XP rev 0.9" package. Set up the smallest package, but make sure you include the drivers.

Add ZoneAlarm if you're planning to connect to the internet (ideally you won't be) and make sure to deny server rights to Generic Host Process (svchost.exe) - this is the biggest back door into WinXP, and the MS firewall doesn't shut it down.

The thing will run in this configuration on less than 64MB RAM.

Don't know about on a Windoze puta, but on a Mac, PT* ROCKS!!!!!!

On Windows everything runs better.

Oh thanks, I needed a good laugh!!!!!

I joke not.

Rumor has it (confirmed by several beta testers) that Windows 7 is actually going to be leaner and meaner than XP, and that MS is finally focusing on stability over idiotproofing.

Windows 7 is pretty fantastic, actually. The boot time could still use some work, but everything else has been grand with the release candidate.

The original poster, why the 6gB RAM? You can only address 4gB in 32-bit Windows (XP, Vista, 7).

I have had Pro Tools LE run well on both operating systems. That said, a Mac will save you some aggravation in regards to compatibility. As the OP is planning on using a lot of virtual instruments, I can see the draw towards building a cheap, powerful box (compared to the cost of a lower end Mac Pro). If the main purpose of the box is to run Pro Tools, I agree Windows XP is better for performance.

Not Pro Tools. I have had Pro Tools run well, or even equally, on a Windows XP machine and Mac OS X 10.5, but I would never say better. Generally, Pro Tools will handle a lot more "normal" stuff on a Mac (like having Bluetooth and wireless active while running ProTools) compared to Windows.

Windows requires a load of customization to get happy with Pro Tools (like turning off ClearType, WAN, etc.) and I always dual-booted Windows systems for Pro Tools. On a Mac, I just install on my main systems and run with it.

The problem lies with Pro Tools, not Windows, but it is a problem nonetheless.

If money is an issue, Windows works fine. You can put together a CHEAP box and run Pro Tools without an issue. Actually, a white Macbook or a Mac Mini runs Pro Tools fine (as long as you aren't planning on using tons of virtual instruments and plug-ins).