Ableton Forum

XP laptop folks,

Just wondering if anyone dual-boots, or do you install music and non-music apps together and just use an external hd for audio files? Does that affect your performance?

Any comments on laptop models and your experiences would be welcomed. I'm personally thinking of getting one of the new Toshiba Satellites, so I'd love to hear from anyone with specific knowledge of the s703/s704s.

here's enthusiastic encouragement for this poll. still trying to gather info about how people use/configure wintel stuff, esp for audio.

can't respond to the poll, yet, as i'm actually a mac user who is probably shopping for a x86 machine... all because of Live.

I partitioned into three different parts on XP pro. One partition (6GB) music (Live, Reason) and other apps (MS Office for work). Another one
(6GB) for movie editing (Avid XPress 3.5), and the last 18 GB go to
Linux 7.3 for work related science stuff. No problem so far. I have a
80 GB firewire drive for all the data on the two XP partitions, Linux
doesn't really except firewire right now. Backup to internal CD writer.

Laptop = Fujitsu Lifebook C, 900 MHz, 30 GB, 256 MB, XP Pro
fast enough for the stuff I'm doing
Audio interface Tascam US-224

I use this rig to put ideas together.

D.

Donaldo,

Do you dual boot, or do you just install the apps into different partitions?

I originally considered dual-booting with two partitions of XP, one for music, one for software development, but the hassle of maintaining the two partitions (you really must treat them each as separate machines for maintenence and update purposes) has prevented me from doing so.

So for now my laptop is dedicated to music purposes with only one O/S (windows XP), though I'd love to hear of other people's experiences in case I decide to do it one day.

Hexadecimal
www.freesidemusic.com

For those who are considering multi-booting, you should read
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/ ... tiboot.asp to get an overview from Microsoft of what it will take.

I dual-boot my desktop at the moment, and I don't think it's too much of a hassle. Granted, my perspective is due to the occasional problem I have of losing my meters in Reason & Live (something I haven't isolated yet). I think maintaining a dual-boot is a lot better than rebuilding a system.

Actually, my new idea is to get some ghosting software and try that as a back up...

I haven't found any performance tuning settings that would be particular to audio - the other applications I run off the laptop are either trivial (Office 97, Mozilla, putty) and won't interfere with audio operations, or (video, VJ and graphics) benefit from the same tunings as the audio apps. I.e. so far I don't see any need to have a extra setup for audio.

I use a extra uncluttered account for live performances, with autostart stripped down to the live set and VJ relevant items and only the required apps on the desktop.

Audio files are on a external firewire disk, to facilitate sharing them between desktop and laptop, and for performance reasons.

Sevo

Apologies for my ignorance, but what specifically do you mean by an 'extra uncluttered account?' A secondary login?

Apologies for my ignorance, but what specifically do you mean by an 'extra uncluttered account?' A secondary login?

Right! My defaulrt login has desktop icons and autostart items for other (video, graphics and utility) software - for live performance that sutff ain't needed.

Sevo

Dual booting can be more hassle than it's worth, for a lot of technical reasons. I used to have a thinkpad that had a removeable hard drive bay. For work (office apps etc) I had one drive, for play I had another.