Laptop/XP Pro/User Profiles

Patch · Post by **Patch** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:21 pm

Can anyone help me??? I want to set up 2 user profiles on my Laptop. One would be my DAW (Tweaked XP Pro), and would be tweaked right up to JUST run audio apps (Live, Reason, Recycle). The other profile would be for internet/MS Office work, and would have no tweaks. (Standard XP Pro Install).

I want ONLY the Audio Apps to be available to the DAW Profile, and ONLY the MS Office Software to be available to the Internet/MS Office Profile.

Can this be done using User Profiles/User Groups? Or does this type of thing need to be done with Drive Partitions? I have never done either - so all help is greatly appreciated.

I realise that this is not strictly a Live related question - but I know there are many a Laptop Jedi up in here - and if any of them could help I would be eternally grateful!

stuffe · Post by **stuffe** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:03 pm

I don't really trust the user profiles within XP, and no matter how cleverly you manage the app's in the profiles, there will still be loads of other apps starting up anyway regardless of which user you use. I'm not sure how much "Tweaking" you could do to one profile that would be of any practical benefit over and above just getting the standard single user profile working as you want, but if you really want to segregate, I might think about a dual boot scenario with two XP Pro installs. Then you can really go to town on one of them, and leave the "Office" boot to have all the memory and CPU hogging task tray items etc....(Quicktime with Itunes anyone...?)

subterFUSE · Post by **subterFUSE** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:42 pm

Can this be done using User Profiles/User Groups? Or does this type of thing need to be done with Drive Partitions? I have never done either - so all help is greatly appreciated.

This can be done, to an extent.

To begin with, when you install Ableton Live, the software asks you if you want to make it available to just you, or to all users of this computer. Answering "just me" will only make Live available to you through the Start Menu.

However, I am not 100% certain if this totally restricts the use of the program, or if it just customizes the Start Menu.

As for optimizing your OS settings, I'll need to ask my friend who is a Windows expert. He told me that when I get my new laptop he can help me streamline the registry, and the "page file".... whatever that is.
I'll try to talk to him sometime today, and will let you know what I find out.

wilsonrx · Post by **wilsonrx** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 2:40 pm

The best way to do this is to dual-boot the machine. This means installing XP twice, preferably on seperate discs, use one for internet/games and the other dedicated to music. This is what I have done; after only six months worth of use the internet/games installation is really slow and sluggish whereas the music installation is really nippy. Perfect!

It is a piece of cake to do, install XP as normal, once it has finished reboot the PC with the XP disc in it. Run the Windows XP setup again, choose to add another installation and you are away. The only downside is, you do need two discs/partitions and it eats hard disc space - we all know how bulky XP is.

Some tips for improving performance can be found at: http://www.tweakxp.com/performance_tweaks.aspx

rsagevik · Post by **rsagevik** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 3:45 pm

Dual boot is the only proper way to do this..
With XPLite you can also strip your XP installation
to a minimum. Works great.

Lo-Fi Massahkah · Post by **Lo-Fi Massahkah** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 5:47 pm

However, I am not 100% certain if this totally restricts the use of the program, or if it just customizes the Start Menu.

You're right. User profiles are mostly about cosmetics as far as I can tell. You can definitely run an app from a different user profile - just use the Explorer. You can even access other profiles' desktops. It all there - but not as obvious!

Cheers,
Mikael