Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 4:27 am
Graphics drivers are really the cause of so much seemingly unrelated crap on windows PCs, especially Vista, that it is like an unfunny groundhog day joke.
One of the reasons we ordered the Studio 15 was because there are known issues with the mobile Nvidia graphics card (in most of Dell's other notebooks which have a card option as opposed to INtel GMA) in terms of driver performance and also overheating.
The Studio 15 has as ATI 3400 graphics card with 256MB ram and my experience has been better with ATI cards in LAPTOPS (but deffo NVidia has been better for workstations and tricked out gaming towers for me). My Inspiron 9100 still rocks with it's 128 MB ATI Radeon 9700 and that's nearly 5 years old now.
Turning off hardware acceleration is crappy for viewing video and gaming (reaallllllly crappy) but it does help me get a few % less CPU overhead when I need it, and Live is not too demanding graphically (esp in Session without extending the mixer metering) so I see more of an advantage with it than with Cubase with it's glossy GUI. I don't usually bother doing this unless I need to squeeze every last ounce out of a very heavy project though.
Disabling wifi/bluetooth and stuff is really a given, and especially antivirus and antispyware or anything non essential running as a background task. But you have to be careful deleting services as some are essential and cause a BSOD or similar nasty crash if you try and stop them. Even on Macs disabling wifi and bluetooth is a given for better performance.
The lappy just arrived this evening, so after I've played with it a bit and set up and installed Microsoft office and internet, I will let you know how I got on with it, but its very nice and quick booting up, I love 7200 rpm drives on lappies, 5400 and slower are so slow to boot and install stuff, not to mention better performance in a DAW.
One of the reasons we ordered the Studio 15 was because there are known issues with the mobile Nvidia graphics card (in most of Dell's other notebooks which have a card option as opposed to INtel GMA) in terms of driver performance and also overheating.
The Studio 15 has as ATI 3400 graphics card with 256MB ram and my experience has been better with ATI cards in LAPTOPS (but deffo NVidia has been better for workstations and tricked out gaming towers for me). My Inspiron 9100 still rocks with it's 128 MB ATI Radeon 9700 and that's nearly 5 years old now.
Turning off hardware acceleration is crappy for viewing video and gaming (reaallllllly crappy) but it does help me get a few % less CPU overhead when I need it, and Live is not too demanding graphically (esp in Session without extending the mixer metering) so I see more of an advantage with it than with Cubase with it's glossy GUI. I don't usually bother doing this unless I need to squeeze every last ounce out of a very heavy project though.
Disabling wifi/bluetooth and stuff is really a given, and especially antivirus and antispyware or anything non essential running as a background task. But you have to be careful deleting services as some are essential and cause a BSOD or similar nasty crash if you try and stop them. Even on Macs disabling wifi and bluetooth is a given for better performance.
The lappy just arrived this evening, so after I've played with it a bit and set up and installed Microsoft office and internet, I will let you know how I got on with it, but its very nice and quick booting up, I love 7200 rpm drives on lappies, 5400 and slower are so slow to boot and install stuff, not to mention better performance in a DAW.