Ableton Forum

hello. not posted here in ages but its always been a good place for this sort of info.

for the last 4 years i have been using a p4 3.2ghz xp laptop with my echo indigo io pcmcia card. it's my studio and gigging laptop. its done me well but its beginning to fall apart and its really not up to the job anymore. I need a new laptop and i'm on an extremely tight budget.
the problem is that nearly every budget laptop only comes with vista home premium. it seems if i want xp then i need to buy a machine with vista business/xp downgrade and that always bumps the price up and reduces the amount of choice.
I'm also planning on replacing the indigo card with an echo audiofire2 as there's not too many laptops that still have the pcmcia slot and this seems a good replacement.

my questions are-

1) what are the main drawbacks of vista compared to xp?

2) can anyone foresee any problems i might have with the combination of vista laptop, echoaudiofire2 and ableton.

martin808 wrote:hello. not posted here in ages but its always been a good place for this sort of info.

for the last 4 years i have been using a p4 3.2ghz xp laptop with my echo indigo io pcmcia card. it's my studio and gigging laptop. its done me well but its beginning to fall apart and its really not up to the job anymore. I need a new laptop and i'm on an extremely tight budget.
the problem is that nearly every budget laptop only comes with vista home premium. it seems if i want xp then i need to buy a machine with vista business/xp downgrade and that always bumps the price up and reduces the amount of choice.
I'm also planning on replacing the indigo card with an echo audiofire2 as there's not too many laptops that still have the pcmcia slot and this seems a good replacement.

my questions are-

1) what are the main drawbacks of vista compared to xp?

2) can anyone foresee any problems i might have with the combination of vista laptop, echoaudiofire2 and ableton.

I'm thinking most of Vistas stuff is fixed now. Vista 32 performs only slightly worse than XP on some tests I've seen.

The things I've heard is to make sure your drivers to your hardware are fully Vista compatible and not beta, and get plenty of Ram (like 3 to 4 gigs). Vista is a ram hog but it is supposed to turn over its ram to other applications if the other applications demand it.

Echo tends to stay ahead of the curve on making quality drivers. I would see if someone else is using your setup to be sure.

1) what are the main drawbacks of vista compared to xp?

Both slow down in a few, also American&Russian hackers like to take over your processing power!

2) can anyone foresee any problems i might have with the combination of vista laptop, echoaudiofire2 and ableton.


Check out the echo forum...


3.) Get a macbook!

jlgrimes wrote: I'm thinking most of Vistas stuff is fixed now.

Except the fact it runs like a dog. Even on a quad 3.11 with 4GB of ram and a squeaky clean install it still runs like molasses compared to OSX or XP.

I have new laptop and made it work on Vista but IT IS NOT WORTH TIME SPENT.
If I knew all that.........
get Mac or XP pc -installed originally (IBM perhaps some other brands still do it for their biz line).
edit: I actually like Vista better then XP, it works better with everything else but unfortunately sucks for music production, performance.

I've only ever used Ableton on Vista and altough it was a bit ropey running earlier 7 updates, it now seems to work fine.
I still have to run it though on classic view.

i have had good luck with vista. been running for a few months now

i've been on vista for over 1 year now, most stable OS i've been on in my life.

the worst part is

a) lack of good, solid functioning drivers - particularly for vista 64. Check your audio card manufacturer to see if they have vista drivers - echo are actually really good for driver support usually, they even have wavert drivers for the IO/DJ (vista's native audio driver, an updated version of DX if you like - but still lacking support and performance compared to ASIO).

b) MS are likely to retire Vista soon and bring in a new os. So just when you have things tweaked for Vista, it will be obsolete in 2-3 years.


Vista is never more stable than win XP. For music production it has higher system latency issues (probably because it's so bloated and resource hogging to start with), unless your audio card has good Vista drivers, making music is a nightmare. My wife has a vista business laptop and every day it is flagging unknown errors, slowing down and requiring messing around with. The security advisor is very annoying and if you turn it off, you leave yourselves vulnerable to nasties. Half of the programs that came preloaded don't even work, for example Roxio burner flags an error every time you try to use it and just crashes, it had no compatible vista driver until recently, even when that was downloaded, it still flags errors in Vista.

I know people who have Vista running relatively OK but none of them claim it's better than their previous XP platform. Vista 64 in essence should be awesome, 64 bit processing, all that addressable ram beyond 3GB that XP Pro (with a dodgy hack) restricts you to. But in reality, there is so little support for it, that you would wish you spent 3 times as much on a Mac Pro.

Works fine for me

I got a cheap vista lappy today actually.

I noticed that the time wasn't correct so I went to change it. check this out for what it took to change the time.

1: click on the time
2: click on 'change date and time settings'
3: click on 'change date and time' again...
4: click continue...
5: change the time
6: click ok
7: click ok again...

what the f**k is all that about? god damnit that is stupid.

now what kind of moron thought that the old fashioned double click on the time and change it method wasn't good enough and thought "hm... you know what people would like? 5 more steps to get the job done"

If you can wait, Vista is the OS to skip, Windows 7 will be out which is Vista but tweaked.

Vista Sux!

There are some things I really like about my Vista Home Premium 32 bit, and some that annoy me.

I haven't had any problems running Live or other apps.

Having said all of that, and this is very important, there is a big difference between 64bit and 32bit Vista which only makes sense, because low-level things like drivers need to be re-written for 64 bit Vista.

SO, always specify whether you mean 64 bit Vista or 32 bit Vista. People have been banned for indiscretions based on this, moaning away while others say "Vista works fine".