Hi, Matt (and David),

About a year ago, my XP laptop's HDD died in the middle of Newfoundland,
and I found an HP W7 64 bit laptop at the Walmart in Grand Falls
Windsor. After a few months, I fell in love with W7 and in March of this
year bought two W7 machines to upgrade my studio from the 2004 Pentium 4
3.0 GHz machines. The edit machine is a Dell Studio XPS9100 with an
i7-930 processor (chip set x58 which is the last one before the
SandyBridge ones which may have different issues) and 12 GB of tri-bus
RAM. The other is my ingest machine so I can edit and ingest in parallel
and it is a Dell Vostro with a Q8400 processor and 4 GB of RAM. Both are
64 bit machines. Samplitude 11 works fine on all of this.

The big headaches that I had were:
--my low-end thermal CD/DVD printer would not work in any way shape or
form on a 64 bit machine, even in XP emulation mode.
--I needed a new sound "card" for the edit machine.

I solved the CD printer problem by installing my first XP Pro machine
(P4, 2.4 GHz) as a third machine in the studio (only the edit machine
has a keyboard and I remote desktop into the other two).

The reason I bought the Dell for ingest was it appeared to be one of the
last machines that was going to handle the PCI bus well and it had two
PCI slots. It was cheaper to buy this computer than to buy two PCIe
interface cards for my two RME Multiface units.

With the two RME Multiface II units on the ingest computer, I needed
another interface for the edit computer, so I looked long and hard and
ended up buying the dual-mode RME Fireface UFX. I connect it via USB
(though FW is an option) because the metered processor load is
substantially lower on the host PC (the i7-930 machine) in the USB mode
than in the FW mode.

I am not running hyperthreading on either machine and I saw between
25-35% of one core having constant activity with the FW interface and
its in the noise with the USB interface. There were other reports of this.

It was a headache, overall, to upgrade all the high-end stuff to W7-64,
but the jump from a 3.2 GHz P4 under XP to the i7 machine for Adobe
Lightroom is nothing short of spectacular.

I have two 23" 1920x1080 Dell Ultrasharp displays on the i7 machine, and
it's nice having that big a workspace.

I am about to buy a new mail computer which is another remote desktop.
So, in full-bore operation, I can have mail, CD printing, and ingest as
remote desktops while running editing on the main machine.

I used one of the 3 GHz P4 machines with XP as a second CD burning
station on a cart as I had recently upgraded the drives in it and I had
a spare printer. It also helps with throughput.

The Gigabit Ethernet seems to keep things moving pretty well, but I do
ingest to local storage and then push out to two RAID5 NAS units for
long-term storage.

Cheers,

Richard

On 2011-08-12 12:45 AM, Matt Sohn wrote:
>>
>> Lastly, broadcast, at least radio broadcast, has stuck, with XP Pro
>> as the OS of choice for PCs. General unstability for audio work and
>> problems with drivers is the reason, possibly along with the
>> conservative nature of broadcast engineers. Also in this world, the
>> Lynx cards have largely replaced the CardDeluxe for two channel
>> applications. RME cards seem more oriented to mult-channel
>> applications.
>>
>
> I have stubbornly clung to XP Pro, at least for my main machine.
> because it just works. In the last year, however, I've gone from 2 to
> 5 computers, so now I have 3 XP, one Vista 64-bit and one W7 machine.
> I cringe every time a new Microsoft update comes out.
> I have 2 Card Deluxes and one RME ADAT interface (the other 2 are
> laptops) and use Wavelab 6 as my stereo editor. Wavelab 6 is not
> supported for 64-bit, but it mostly works on my Vista machine (except
> I have to monitor recordings through Audacity), and Wavelab 7 is only
> supported on W7 onward. This is a rock and a hard place for me. I got
> one license for Wavelab 7, which I put on my W7 machine, and spent
> many hours trying to comprehend the new workflow. I just didn't get
> it.. So, I retreated to my trusty XP Wavelab 6 setup. So now I am
> doing my most productive work on the slowest computer I have using
> outdated, no longer supported software, because it ...just...works.
> I bemoan the relentless advance of technology, but I realize its
> inevitability.
> In my (little-used) multi-track room I have a Presonus 24-track
> digital mixer that connects to the computer via Firewire 400. To get a
> compatible firewire interface for my laptop computer, I had to buy an
> express card which will dislodge itself upon the slightest
> provocation, which does not instill confidence. I ended up getting a
> Firewire 800 PCI-e interface for the home desktop, wihch works fine
> with a 400 adapter, but feels rather dodgy as well (I hate things
> hanging off of my computer, be it a dongle, an e-licenser or a
> 1/4"-1/8" adapter). On the other hand, I recently bought a portable
> 1TB hard drive which runs on USB3, However, I have no USB3 ports on
> any of my computers. Luckily, USB3 is downward-compatible with USB2,
> so I can use it, but I can't take advantadge of USB3's promised
> 10-fold speed increase.
> When will it all end?, or perhaps more pertinent, when will the
> vendors catch up with the technology?
>
> My .04 cents
>

--
Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.