If you haven't already done it, go to www.musicxp.net and do all the tweaks. Also works for people on older PC's.

__________________

i dont really understand it.....
but ive got my new lappy and if i can make it better I WILL.

It's good for just maximising your laptop anyway. But it's a site run by a muso dude.

My fave is getting rid of balloons and animations, cuz they shit me. <3

__________________

Ok, all looks well and good, but is it ACTUALLY worth it if you have a reasonable performing machine as it is? I used to do most of that stuff on my old steam-powered bad boy, but I'm running a pretty new machine at the moment with Cubase 3 and it's all gravy. Bother?

Well I got this laptop purely to make music ( ) so I tweaked it to fuck. And as soon as I get a USB soundcard for this badgirl I'll be uninstalling all the rest of the shit I don't need.

Turning off things like graphics ESPECIALLY if you have shared graphics can make all the difference with your recordings sometimes. XP is nice and stable for recording generally though. So was WinME, actually- because I did all these tweaks for my old system back in the day.

So, yes bother if you're not dedicating the machine to music. And even if you are it can't hurt, takes like an hour to tweak everything.

__________________

PS Hey rosie, what machine did you end up getting? I can't find your thread in Computers. It doesn't have vista does it? Cuz you can't use the tweaks for Vista yet- no one has had time to find tweaks for vista to my knowledge yet and I haven't even seen it running (beta/longhorn version doesn't count). So don't try it unless you run XP, okay?

__________________

Ah, see mine gets more use as a general like all round thang, mostly for photo/designy stuff these days, and I like my nice wallpapers and screensavers, so I'll maybe keep it as it is. Still, I'm kinda tempted to kick my start menus back to win-95 style cos I dig all that old-skool grey-block look.

Yeah I love my wallpapers, so I'll keep them on my PC, I'm removing all the presets except one for the lappy. It's going to be utterly gutted by the time I'm done, so I'm getting internet use out of it as much as possible now before I disable the wifi connection.

Plus there's a guest sleeping in the lounge, so I can't use the other for the net right now.

I'm pretty happy with the lappy, actually. Not entirely what I wanted, but the supurb service at the shop made it so. It's just a compaq presario v6000 running XPpro. Don't like the touch mouse thingy very much and it's hard to type on a laptop right now but I'm sure I'll get used to it. It's a very sexy looking computer.

EDIT: I'm only going to have these programs on it; Reason, Cakewalk Sonar, Acid, Sound Forge and possibly Ableton Live, but I haven't decided if I need it yet. Couldn't hurt, it's quite small.

__________________

Awesome, cheers for that from someone who just wants to generally improve computer performance (mine may as well use a damn hamster on a wheel to keep it going, for all the speed I'm getting out of it). I saw my bf using the tips on that site and kept meaning to ask him for the url.

It only just occurred to me that I have feck-all ram (192mb, I think), I should really upgrade it. I've been used to my mother's laptop, running 1gb, and this is hell. Only then could I consider doing anything music-related with this thing. It's only a few years old, goddamn. I hate that computers get almost obsolete so damn quickly.

__________________
Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.

*sigh* ah fuck its got vista. i really friggen hate vista at the moment, i desperately hope the updates improve it. is it possible to do a recovery or something with XP? hhh, its not only better but it LOOKS better too.
i got annnnn asus pro 31J-
eep should have used ebay.

back to recording and stuff though, do you know any programs to convert m4a into mp3 or the like? sorry to make your thread all off topic.

Well, for the XP thing, you could just get an XP disk and reformat if you haven't got anything worth keeping yet.

And for the M4a-MP3, get sonic stage. Converts atrac stuff, too.

__________________