On to Windows 10!

[StudioNSFW]

I did it.  In the course of integrating a Octa-Capture into the rig, I hit an insurmountable problem on my olde and heretofore rock stable Win 7 install - I just could not get the VS-700R to play nice with the Octa-Capture. Either device worked great separately, but when I would enable VS-expand to sync them together the timing would go way off and anything I tried to playback would crash almost immediately. LOTS of troubleshooting and RTFMing convinced me that I had it all set up and cabled correctly but the problem persisted.  Eventually my USB ports themselves started acting wonky so the system would often completely lose the keyboard and mouse. System restores, driver updates for everything in the system followed, a lot of buffer twiddling did not clear the issue.

I'd been reluctant to upgrade because of the reputation Win10 has for tracking data and upgrades that are not, but with "The Desk" unstable, it was worth a shot.  Worst case I could blow it away and do a Win 7 reinstall. Since all my data lives on the storage network and not within the PeeCee, there wasn't any risk to my bits, just the fear that the driver hack wouldn't work and the VS-700 would be unusable.  Either way, I figured a re-image was the next step, so I installed Win10 Pro, edited the VS-700 driver per the instructions in the old forum, and tried again...

And it works! Yesterday starting around 2:00 PM I did the install with all network connectivity physically disconnected to keep Microsoft from insisting on a Microsoft account, went through and toggled every privacy setting I could find to my level of paranoia, brought it online, watched it's behavior at the firewall for traffic that would trigger aforementioned paranoia..All good.  The same tracks now are working with the VS-expand...getting to my happy place of being able to use those Auto-sense VS preamps in the Octa without having to re-cable all the monitoring stuff  that runs from the VS-700R.  A few hours to reinstall all the Sonar versions for the VSTs, then CbB and the rest of my plug ins, and we're back to work this morning.

Probably in a few months I'll question my hesitancy to upgrade for so long...but as we like to say in the infosec dodge..."Just being paranoid doesn't make you wrong, just tedious"

[Starship Krupa]

While you're in a Windows 10 configure-y mood, a suggestion of mine that has worked well for many on this forum is to go into your Security settings and exclude certain folders from Windows Defender's realtime scan.

The reason this is extra important for Cakewalk is that Cakewalk's playback engine reads every audio file associated with every unarchived Track as it is rolling, and Defender scans every file that is accessed by every program. That means that every time you load a sample, loop, plug-in, .dll, .WAV file, vocal take, guitar solo, whatever, Windows 10's built-in malware scanner is running it through its filtering engine to make sure it's not carrying a malicious payload. And Microsoft makes it difficult to disable realtime scanning. Not so bad on Pro, but I think it still gets switched back on every time you get an update.

So, I exclude all folders associated with DAW work, including my plug-in folders, sample folders, loop folders, project folders, audio folders, and the Cakewalk program folders. Because, you know, otherwise Windows Defender would be doing its duty to protect my computer from potential harm lurking within "Luna 2020, Snare, Rec (95).wav" and "iZotope Iris2.vst3" by adding another layer of computer processing to the disk reads.

And....speaking of privacy and disk activity, I found another wonderful Win 10 thing it does. This was after I put a new SSD in my main system, yay, and I switched it over to UEFI booting, which, BTW, if yours is still doing it the BIOS way, look into it. I found that not only did it speed up the boot time from "what I remember as being standard Windows bootup time from about 2005" to "holy crap I looked away and it has the screen with the baby elephant on it!" but it somehow made it so that Windows 10 recognizes my hardware better somehow. It sounds odd, I know, but I was able to run newer versions of my graphics drivers and so forth once I made the switch to UEFI. It's not for the fainthearted, and for sure have an image backup ready, but I found it to be worth the trouble.

Anyway, after I switched to UEFI, I checked to see what all the disk activity was about with the computer just sitting idling. Using Process Monitor, I looked at exactly what the file activity was about and saw that the SYSTEM process was responsible for dozens of log files constantly being written to the Windows\system32 directory. Dusting off my decades-old Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer training, I launched Event Viewer to see what that was all about and in addition to the usual Application, Security, and System logs I knew from the Windows NT4.0 days, under the hierarchy Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows there was this HUGE list of log files just logging away all day long.

When I opened some of them, it was just mundane stuff like this service stopped or started or something occurred, and none of it was information that was of any use to me whatsoever. It's not like I'm going to troubleshoot my system by going into the logs subsystem and reading them, so what they are basically is Microsoft checking on how well my computer is running for their own purposes. Which, hey, I don't care about that in and of itself, happy to help if that's all there was to it, but they are degrading the performance of my computer and shortening the life of its components by doing so. If they asked me "would you like to help us improve the product by sending anonymoust weekly reports?" I might consent to that. But instead, without asking me, they set my system up to do writes 24/7 and then spew the results to their data collection servers at unknown intervals. Um, no.

Here's how to turn those logs off. In the Event Viewer, click the >'s until you've opened Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows. In all of those you will find logs. Click on them and you will see whether they have been active or not. Right click on the log icon and you'll be able to disable/enable the log.

There are hundreds. I know of no way to disable all of them at once. I just go in every so often and do a bunch. Oddly enough, I found one category, Audio, that had logs I wanted to enable. One of them, Glitch Detection, seems to log about 4 of them a day. The others say the usual "audio device state changed" like I'm going to have to look for my Firepod in Reno or something....

[StudioNSFW]

Thanks for the tips...Done, Done and Done - UEFI was actually easier than getting legacy BIOS to work properly on this particular motherboard - I believe they were emulating the legacy mode and the UEFI is native. In any event, no worries there,  Exclusions set up and logging disabled.  Anything else? (I'm icing my hand down after risking CT disabling all the logging, but will be back to it soon...) 

[winkpain]

I'm curious, did you do a "dirty" upgrade to Win10 or a clean install and then reinstall everything?

I am on the edge of doing similar, for different reasons,  bringing my Win7 system to 10. I have had a secondary mobile system with 10  on it from day one and all my same (same as the Win7 system) versions of CbB and plugins up and running from the beginning there with no issues.

Of course I'd love to just do an in place, dirty upgrade to Win 10 and not re-install everything else since I have all the same stuff running on the 10 and know that it "works". Is this just wishful thinking?

[StudioNSFW]

i blew all partitions away, let the installer repartition the only drive in the system, and installed clean.  I don't keep any bits on the computer itself other than than the programs and apps, so no pain for me.  With a sick  system that was the smart choice,  so the new OS could just remap the drivers and internal hardware.  No driver woes at all other than the VS-700, which was easy enough. 

I did have to crawl the volumes on the SAN (iSCSI mounts) and change the NTFS permissions to the new user entity, but that was as hard as it got.  That volume was built on a much earlier WIndows 7 machine and the new system was having trouble getting write permissions, but that was more or less expected behaviour.

Edited May 11, 2020 by StudioNSFW

[winkpain]

8 minutes ago, StudioNSFW said:

i blew all partitions away, let the installer repartition the only drive in the system, and installed clean.  I don't keep any bits on the computer itself other than than the programs and apps, so no pain for me.  With a sick  system that was the smart choice,

I did have to crawl the volumes on the SAN (iSCSI mounts) and change the NTFS permissions to the new user entity, but that was as hard as it got.  That volume was built on a much earlier WIndows 7 machine and the new system was having trouble getting write permissions, but that was more or less expected behaviour.

Gotcha. That is the smart way to go.

I do not have a sick  Win 7 system at all. It was a machine meant to come with Win 10 to begin with, but at the time of the build i wasn't sure of compatibility with my plugins, specifically Waves, so opted for Win 7. But I've since upgraded everything crucial, have the same versions on both systems and all works fine. I have no other hardware or software  concerns like you did and no other practical reasons other than the end-of-life concerns for Win 7. So in my case, since "it ain't broke" , I'd like to think  that it could just be an easy, labor free upgrade scenario. But.... can it be?

[StudioNSFW]

Id say, go for the dirty install (Since you have a backup machine anyway) and see if everything works as it sould. If not, then blow it away and do aclean install. Im skeptical of dirty installs going back to Win98 and how bad that was if you attempted a dirty install but M$ seems to really have their sh!t together on this one.