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Windows 10 settings / stuff you can turn off for music?

chrysshawk said:
Thread might deserve a sticky.
Did install W10Pro on master+slave this weekend, and there are currently glitches in C8 while playback and worse during playback+recording (on W8.1 P this did not happen). For Win 8.1P I used IOBit's suite to uninstall a ton of the Windows applications which run in the background and cannot otherwise be uninstalled, will also do this on Win10.
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I'm going to get a slave PC soon. Would you recommend staying away from 10 or won't it matter at all for VEP?
 
D.Salzenberg said:
Well, I don't normally mess with Windows settings too much, but after reading this thread I turned Defender off and my samples load much much faster when I load a project.
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Doesn't seem to make any measurable difference here, but I guess it's worth trying out, since it will depend on the computer configuration what kind of a hit Defender (or MSE for the Win7 guys) has.
 
paaltio said:
I don't turn off anything. Most of the "optimize Windows for audio" guides are outdated, and I've even seen some that are pure nonsense, so I would steer clear of them.

The essential thing on a new Windows install is to check with LatencyMon that there aren't misbehaving drivers. After that you're basically good to go. If something else is causing problems I would address that on a case-by-case basis.
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That's my experience as well.

I ran Win7 stock and now I run Win10 stock (on a laptop - away from the studio for a year). I've tried all the tweaks and never found any that made a difference on any practical measure. I've run across some weirdness in Win10 but nothing that causes any meaningful change in my workflow. I'm assuming it's just new OS weirdness.

As you say, there used to be some things that you could do to make *tiny* differences in performance. People forgot to stop worrying about them...!

rgames
 
Update; W10Pro+C8Pro+VEP on slave seems to trigger ASIOGuard issues similar to what Cubase had before the maintenance update(s). Not sure if this is just my build, but it's certainly a pain in the ass.
 
rgames said:
I've tried all the tweaks and never found any that made a difference on any practical measure.
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I know what you mean, Richard, but I am getting really terrible performance on Windows 10 so I'm going to try something.

Anyone else using Do Not Spy software? It looks pretty invasive itself; not that I'm skeptical of the motivations of the people who wrote it but it looks as though it gets way into how Windows 10 works. I am wondering if it could have unintended consequences.
 
JohnG said:
Anyone else using Do Not Spy software? It looks pretty invasive itself; not that I'm skeptical of the motivations of the people who wrote it but it looks as though it gets way into how Windows 10 works. I am wondering if it could have unintended consequences.
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60376462.jpg

Not exactly on the main topic, but you reminded me of this.

Lannister said:
Never used OSX, but do people go to such lengths on that OS too? I only ever read about it with regard to Windows.
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Yeah, there are some people who get a stable situation with their Mac DAW's and never upgrade, because all OS updates can have unintended consequences and incompatibilities.
 
Jacob, I look EXACTLY like that. Uncanny resemblance.
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Just realized that, under "Settings" "Privacy" "Background apps," Windows 10 by default turns on about a dozen apps (including Weather, Maps and Xbox) that are not needed for music, as far as I can see.

I turned them all off.

I would not have expected to find these under "Privacy," so that's why I mentioned it.

There are lots of other functions under Privacy I've also turned off, but these were at the very end and hadn't previously noticed them.
 
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Other than the obvious, I am not going to try to tweak this OS for a while. I spoke with VisionDAW and they said Microsoft are spitting out hundreds of updates a week, including fixes of previous updates. That, plus the clear effort to integrate somewhat disparate-looking functions, makes me loth to start turning a lot of stuff off, even updates, because it's difficult to guess which ones might somehow affect audio / asio / stability / CPU.

Normally I like to be a bit of a cowboy on excising unwanted Windows functions, but under the circumstances I plan to put up with (most) of Microsoft's shenanigans for a while.
 
JohnG said:
Anyone else using Do Not Spy software? It looks pretty invasive itself; not that I'm skeptical of the motivations of the people who wrote it but it looks as though it gets way into how Windows 10 works. I am wondering if it could have unintended consequences.
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I tried similar software because i feel some paranoid with windows 10 and, for whatever reason, always ends with the CPU at 90-100% with nothing loaded, so i back to old setups, old school, deactivate everything that use your HDD and/or create conflict with your libs and that's all.

All off (as minimum), ok, this is my system and its only use for DAW so do no neet some stuff:

Windows search, Windows defender, Windows Update, background intelligent transfer ,Superfetch, Prefetch, readyboot, Hibernation. No antivirus installed. No Internet access (only to activate licenses).

If you need some functions like windows updates, you can enable/disabled this in "services".

And everything related to windows 10 security, always off, there is a lot of pages about this on the net.
 
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If you run Win10PRO you need to edit a local policy to disable windows defender, this put windows defender to start in manual mode.
 
KaBirdi said:
Make sure your sample drives are excluded from Windows Defender within settings. Your samples will load slowly otherwise. I scratched my head over this for a while and then realised later. Since Microsoft Security Essentials and Defender are both integrated into Windows 10 now.
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WOW! Thank you very much for sharing this! I'll do it the minute I get home later today!
 
JohnG said:
Other than the obvious, I am not going to try to tweak this OS for a while. I spoke with VisionDAW and they said Microsoft are spitting out hundreds of updates a week, including fixes of previous updates. That, plus the clear effort to integrate somewhat disparate-looking functions, makes me loth to start turning a lot of stuff off, even updates, because it's difficult to guess which ones might somehow affect audio / asio / stability / CPU.

Normally I like to be a bit of a cowboy on excising unwanted Windows functions, but under the circumstances I plan to put up with (most) of Microsoft's shenanigans for a while.
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I best most of those updates reset everything you touched. Unfortunately none of my systems are identical so I could create or use benchmark tests to see how how W10 fares against W7. You would think W10 would be better because of needing less resources. The other part could be that many drivers/apps from W7,W8 work in 10 and developers aren't really optimizing software for W10 unless something isn't working. I've read there were issues with Focusrite 1394 interfaces and some Roland units.
 
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another thing worth mentioning is actually hardware related. If you use NVIDIA graphics card(s) and do not use the Stereoscopic displays, or use a SHIELD tablet, disable these 2 services:
NV
  • Nvidia Streamer Network Service (latest version of driver services)
  • Nvidia Streamer Service (older, may still be present if drivers are just updated over previous and not clean installed)
  • Nvidia Stereoscopic 3D Driver Service
  1. Open the task manager, go to the services tab and right click on any service, and select "open services.
  2. Locate the Nvidia Services (listing should be alphabetical), and you will find these services.
  3. Right click on one and select Properties.
  4. In the new dialog window: under startup Type select "Disabled"
  5. In the service Status, if it is currently running, click on "Stop".
  6. Repeat for the other services mentioned above.
Whenever another driver update occurs, these services will be restored to their default state (most likely active). You will want to check that these services are disabled after each update.

There are numerous reports on Nvidia's forums that the Streamer services were taxing their OS drive's read with contiguous access, and experiencing various other operating system slow-downs.

The Stereoscopic driver while unused can still eat up valuable task scheduling time when left active and trying to communicate with the graphics card to detect the connected screen(s) status(es). For realtime performance it can mean the difference between a buffer dropout and smoother performance.
 
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Here are some ways to get back space on a 128gb SSD that houses OS + Apps.

1: Pagefile is default same as RAM. This means on a fresh install on a computer with 32GB RAM, the page file is 32GB. This is wasted space, adjust as you wish.
2: If you dont use hibernation, turn it off and delete the hidden hibernation file. Whoops, there is another 10-30GB.
 
I've decided to stay on Win 7, but have purchased another SSD for the DAW PC, and plan to install Win 10 on this as an alternative boot, at which point I can load the drivers for the audio interface, install Reaper & a few VSTs etc., and see how everything goes in a sort of test environment. If and when it seems like a good idea, I can then port over everything, go through the reactivation stuff as necessary and move into the Win 10 environment properly. But not until it's clear that it won't create problems that I do not have now.

Since my DAW is always offline, I'm not particularly worried about the auto updates in 10. I do updates maybe once per year, and always have the drive imaged before doing so.
 
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