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Setting up your PC for duty as a Digital Audio Workstation under Windows XP need not be as difficult as you might think. In fact, as you do so, you will quickly realize how to diagnose problems and how to fix them. 

Windows XP Audio Optimisation

Once you have got your computer up and running, the first important thing to do is to set it up so that is optimised for carrying out the duties of a digital audio workstation (DAW). This is not as difficult as some might like you to think. It will not impact on the way other applications work, so your computer need not be any less functional, with one exception. If you use a display card with a great deal of memory, a good deal of the memory in your computer is likely to be dedicated to the display. This may impact on the ability of your computer to run many effects and can in some circumstances lead to poor over-all performance. Also, some graphics cards enhanced performance drivers can cause your computer to prioritize memory and processor use for use with the graphics card. This can severely affect the amount of computing power available for audio processing. 

A computer optimised for gaming may not perform as well as you might like for audio work. It is recommended that you choose a graphics card capable of performing normal every-day duties, rather than one specially built for a high demand gaming experience. This way it is also possible to choose one which does not have a cooling fan. This will keep your computer quieter as well. If only a single monitor is required at may not be necassary to install an additional card at all. Some of the GPUs provided on current motherboards are perfectly respectable. Usually a setting of 64-128MB for the size of the memory allocated to the GPU is sufficient. This setting is allocated in the BIOS.

In fact, there are only a few system settings which are absolutely imperative to making a Windows XP computer perform adequately as a DAW. There are however, a large number of other settings which can be changed. These will make incremental performance improvements, but are not strictly necessary. Then, further to this, you may wish to make a few changes to the "WinXP Experience" which will remove some common annoyances and give you a smoother ride.
First, the changes which are strictly needed:

• Background services:
  This is very important to change. It makes the processor treat all the sound effect processing done in the digital domain as important tasks and gives them priority over the day-to-day programs running on a PC. All plugins are treated as background services. Users will not notice any difference in the use of their computers in the use of day-to-day programs.
  To change the priority setting for Background services:
  Go to: Settings->Control Panel->System->Advanced-> Performance, Settings and click on the "Advanced" tab. Under Processor Scheduling select Background services and click on apply.


• Use an independant physical hard drive for recording your music projects:
  This is not a PC tuning tweak, but a significant performance enhancement. Installing a drive for your projects will enable much faster reading and writing of music related media. The drive should not simply be another partition on your system drive, but a completely separate drive from the one which contains your operating system and programs. If you don't, you are likely to start getting clicks and pops as the hard drive tries to perform too many tasks at once.
  A hard drive has an arm, not entirely disimilar to a turntable. This skips around the disk at very high speed, reading and writing data in different locations as it goes. If it is trying to read and write operating system and program data, as well as media file data, there will be a point at which it has to start putting the data in a cue because it can't keep up with the workload.
  An internal SATA drive is best, but if you have to use an IDE drive, put it on it's own seperate cable for better performance. More informationabout this is on the Inside The Box Page.


• Disable system Sounds
  This option will stop the system sounds from playing through your soundcard. You will probably have set your soundcard to a far higher sample rate than Windows sounds use for playback. If Windows is allowed control over your soundcard, every time a Windows sound plays it will re-set the card to the sampling frequency required by Windows Sounds, but it will not re-set it to the sampling frequency of your DAW program. This can be very aggravating.
  To avoid this in control panel-> Sounds and audio devices, click on the 'Sounds' tab and under 'sound scheme' select 'no sounds'.
  You should also disable the ability of Windows to map through the soundcard. This is achieved by clicking on the 'Hardware' tab and selecting your soundcard from the menu. Click on the properties tab and select properties-> audio devices-> your soundcard-> Properties andchack the box 'Do not map through this device'.
  Now Windows will leave you and your soundcard to make music without interuption.


• Disable Drive indexing:
  Windows automatically enables drive indexing. this facility makes very complex file searching faster, but in practice it can slow down the reading and writing of media files, perhaps causing a slight performance hit in terms of how many audio tracks you can record and playback at the same time.
  To disable: Right click on each drive in Windows Explorer, click on 'Properties' and uncheck "Allow Indexing this disk to allow for fast file searching". Whilst you are there make sure that the checkbox 'Enable compression on this drive is also unchecked.

These are two additional settings which can significantly improve the over-all performace of any computer.

• Setting the Page File Size:
  The Page file (or Swap File) is an area of Hard drive which can be used by Windows as virtual memory if all of the RAM (the physical memory) is in use. There are a couple of enhancements that can be made to the way this works.
  I should stress that it is not a good idea to remove the existing swap file on your system drive.
  There are various opinions on the subject of page-file sizes. I will avoid getting involved with opinion here. The simple facts are that a page file managed by Windows XP can impact on the performance of the PC because it may often change in size, Hard-Drive space is not expensive, a page-file which is too small may affect performance and a page-file which is excessive in size will not impact on your computers performance. These facts together imply that the page-file should be larger than you will ever need it to be. In practice I would suggest that a size of between 2 and 3 times the amount of physical RAM in the computer is relatively safe, but you could make it larger if you wish.
  To change the page-file size go to: Settings-> Control Panel-> System-> Advanced-> Performance Settings-> Advanced-> Virtual Memory-> Change, Select 'Custom Size' and enter the required size. Click 'Set'. The settings will take effect when you re-start Windows.
  Another page-file tweak, which in most cases will boost performace is the addition af another swap file on a seperate drive. In the same way that using a separate drive for music projects will enhance the performance of your computer, dedicating a drive for the physical reading and writing of data can make the physical aspect of operating the swap-file faster, thus improving the over-all performance of the operating system when the phyical RAM is being used in its entirety.
  To add another swap-file, click on the drive in the top window to select it, select 'Custom Size', set the values for initial size and Maximum Size and click 'Set'. The system will need to be re-started for the changes to take effect. Windows will automatically select a swap-file on a separate drive in preference to the one on the system drive. Don't be tempted to put it on your Music hard-drive. This will affect the performance of your DAW adversely.

Additional settings which can make a smaller, but significant improvement to the performance of your DAW. These are a matter of choice, but the first one makes a greater difference than all the others and I would recommend changing it.

• Disable visual effects
  This will free up some system resources which make Windows look pretty, but are not really needed. Personally I don't like my big powerful computer to look horrible, so I enable 'Show Windows contents while dragging'.
  In System-> Performance Options-> Visual Effects, select 'Adjust for best Performance'.Then you can tick 'Show Windows contents while dragging' in the menu if you so wish.


• Disable Error Reporting
  Under System Properties-> Advanced, click on the 'Error Reporting' tab. Click on the 'Disable error reporting' radio button.
  This will stop Windows from asking you if you would like to send an error report to Microsoft every time an error occurs.


• Disable Automatic Restart
  In System Properties-> Advanced, click on Startup and recovery, settings. Untick 'Automatically restart.


• Disable Remote Access
  Unless you specifically want to allow control of your computer by another one, this should really be disabled. There are also security issues attached to allowing other users to allow access to your computer via a network. In some cases you might want to gain access to your conputer, maybe to control it from a laptop in another room. In this case it can be left untouched, or re-enabled.
  In System Properties-> Remote, uncheck the 'Remote assistance' and 'Remote Desktop' tabs.


• Disable Power Management
  Go to Display Options in Control Panel and click on the Screen Saver tab. Click the 'power' button.
  Under 'Turn off hard disks select 'never' and under 'System Standby' select 'never'.
  Under the 'Hibernate' tab, uncheck 'Enable hibernation'.


• Disable system Restore
  The system restore feature in Windows can occasionaly decide to write a restore point whilst you are working.This can be particularly annoying if it decides to do it in the middle of a take.
  If you are an experienced Windows user you might want to disable it completely, but you should at least visit the tab and decide how you can best make it work for you. I would strongly suggest setting the interval for the restore points to occur over a suitably long time-span.


• Disable Windows Automatic Updates
  If you are connected to the internet Windows will occasionally try to automatically perform an update. This can be very annoying in the middle of a session. You can always choose to do this manually.
  To disable automatic updates go to Control Panel-> Automatic updates and check the tickbox 'Turn off automatic updates'.


• Disable Fast User Switching
  Fast User Switching allows multiple account holders on one computer to switch between desktops. It keeps all running applications active in the memory of the comuter for any user who is logged on at the time. To disable this feature go to Conrol Panel-> user accounts-> Change the way users log on and off and untick 'Use Fast User Switching'.


• Disable Desktop Cleanup Wizard
  Go to Control panel-> Display-> Customise Desktop, uncheck 'Run Desktop Cleanup wizard'.


• Disable Baloontips
  This will get rid of that annoying little balloon which keeps appearing above the taskbarYou may prefer to do this manually if you are familiar with Windows Registry, but if you do not, this little script from Doug Knox will do it for you. As with all registry settings, modifications the Windows registry can cause un-predictable results if they are made wrongly.
  To disable balloontips select 'run...' from the start menu and open the Registry editor by typing 'regedit'. In the Registry editor. Select HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\.
  Add a new Dword and name it 'EnableBalloonTips'. Set the Dword to a value of '0'.

Finally, there are a number of ulitities which you are likely to require for your DAW.
Here is a list of links and brief explanation of what each one does. All of the programs listed below are free to download and either freeware or shareware.

Avira AntiVir
Antivir is a free, unobtrusive antivirus software. As a frequent internet user I have been using it for a number of years without any virus attacks. Highly recommended.

BRU, the Bulk Rename Utility by Jim Wilsher
If you intend to work with samples, you will find yourself often having to re-name folders full of them in some logical fashion so that they can be easily managed. This is the best one I have found.

Dtaskmanager by Dimio
is a powerful alternative to Windows Task Manager

Foxit PDF Reader
is a powerful PDF Reader for Windows, but a fraction of the size of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

HD Tune
An excellent hard drive testing utility. This program allows to to see the features available on your hard drives, test them for speed, check errors, Etcetera.

Jarte
is an alternative to Microsoft Wordpad. It has a single click style interface and also saves in .rtf, .doc and .txt formats.

Studio Buddy
This is a well written database of recording hints and tips for the aspiring musician. Even if you consider yourself a know-it-all this little program is useful for reminding you of things you might have forgotten to consider.

WinRaR Archiver
is a powerful archiver and extractor. This is an unexpiring trial version.

7-zip
is a donationware Zip utility capable of reading and archiving in many formats.

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