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Re: Optimizing Windows ME |
In Reply to: Optimizing Windows ME posted by Avelon on January 02, 200 at 07:21:16 AM:
I'm going to shoot from the hip here, so please don't shoot me down with flames, I'm just giving one person's opinion/advice here:
The virtual memory settings should be found where they always have been and that's in your control panel for the Operating System. I havn't used ME yet, but I have used Windows 2000 server, and I've heard Windows 2000 and Windows ME are very much the same. The virtual memory should be set according to the advice of your recording software provider. If you have no such advice, bump your virtual memory up to a minimum of 256M and Max of 600M for your RAM you mentioned you had. These are ball park figures and some people may contest these, but for now, try them for yourself.
The next thing to do is to determine where the bottle neck happens to be in speed. I've heard good things about the SB Live sound card, however, I noticed on Microsoft's website that it is not one of the TESTED audio cards for Windows ME. It might be a good idea to check with Microsoft's website and determine an alternate audio card for best performance.
The other thing might be your hard drive throughput. Ultra DMA drives, even though they are fast, may be the bottleneck. I use SCSI-UltraWide drives for my audio stuff and its just right for speed. I've never known the ULTRA DMA drives to be a problem for data throughput, but you never know. Many people use ULTRA DMA drives without a problem, so don't hack those drives just yet - read on...
Finally, you never mentioned what software you're using for your audio stuff. This could be the big factor, because many times the software you record with is limited by its own parameters, no matter what you do with the physical hardware or the settings on the OS. I learned this the hard way once and I called my software provider and they're like, "You idiot! Change this and this and you'll be fine up to 60 tracks!" - DUH! I felt dumb! So maybe you might want to call them regarding settings on your software.
The final moral of the story is: Running Windows ME is probably a bad idea. Microsoft Windows operating systems are known to suck the life out of a fast machine very quickly and Windows ME is supposedly built around the technology from Windows NT and Windows NT was very buggy and had many memory leaks which cause problems over time. For my system I have been running the block I version of Windows 95 with all the patches from Microsoft since it came out and I've tried Windows 98 and found it to be hogging my machine so I went back to windows 95 block I again. Upgrading to the newest latest & greatest doesn't always mean the best performance. On my machine (Pentium III/600MHz/256M RAM PC133) I havn't noticed even a slight hiccup and I've pushed my machine hard in the recent past.
If you need any one on one advice, just email me:
EddieCDatyahoo.com