WIndows 10 Dual boot

[Francisco de Borja Torres]

Hi

In the year 2019 is still necessary with windows 10 have a dual boot for DAW and general purpose?

Thank you and forgive my bad English.

[Tenfoot]

Both Windows and DAW's have come a long way Francisco. It is no longer neccessary to have a separate clean boot sector to have stable performance.  Windows 10 is very stable, and all of your software will work together just fine.

[InstrEd]

I think with Windows 10 you will be fine without a dual-boot system.

[Kev]

If your DAW computer doubles up as the "family PC", then I would definitely go for dual-boot.

[msmcleod]

The answer to this really depends on what your "general purpose" needs are.

If your other software is going to include a lot of background processes, messaging apps, cloud syncs etc, then this will affect the performance of your DAW to some extent. Obviously with faster machines, this may not be an issue.

Personally I always use a dual boot for music applications, as I want to keep my DAW boot as clean and minimal as possible. If nothing else, it drastically reduces the risk of some other application breaking something.

This of course is my personal choice, not a recommendation.

[Tenfoot]

4 hours ago, Kev said:

If your DAW computer doubles up as the "family PC", then I would definitely go for dual-boot.

The "family PC" could indeed introduce a level of chaos I had not considered Kev:)

 

[mettelus]

I agree with the above that dual boot is not necessary. One caveat is that setting most processes to "manual" helps in many respects, since the machine will only load things as you call them after a boot. There are a few programs that reset this after started (Adobe being a prime offender), but otherwise the computer can be tailored to boot clean, then used for whatever tasks you choose.

That said, I have not had issues multi-tasking without Win10 running in a specific "mode." As mentioned above, things have come a long way.

[Francisco de Borja Torres]

Thank you all for the answers.The general purpose computer would be, text editing, surfing the internet, Photoshop and Capture One, basically.

At the moment I will continue with the dual boot although I do not rule out when I go to an SSD disk I have only one installation for all this.

 

Thanks for all your replies.

[Starship Krupa]

When I was running on my i5 notebook with 4G of RAM, I used Process Lasso to kill any unnecessary programs. Just start it before I start Cakewalk or whatever other resource-sensitive program.

[razor7music]

Also - ideally, you don't want your DAW to have an Internet connection due to unwanted exposure to malicious attacks or destructive updates. Personally, I've never been able to hold to this practice because I rely too much on my computer to access stuff on the Internet and I can't afford to have a dedicated DAW that isn't a multi-purpose machine. Also, with so many music creator tools and services being in the cloud these days, I don't know if this best practice is still practical. Thoughts?

[Gswitz]

My kid said with such disdain, 'this isn't a gaming pc.'

But she runs origin with lots of games on my daw. Madden 2020... Fps games i don't know the names of, Sims.

My wife and kid can both log in to my daw.

I have oracle express and visual studio installed. 

I don't know what messaging apps people use. We might be short on those.

We use r studio to oracle.  I use atom for working in text files like sql, xml, json, ts. I run git bash.

Daws are cakewalk, mixbus, and rme tools.

I don't dual boot.

I watch college games with my dad on it, using the internet connection to stream and my alpha track as volume control.

In the end my kid has been quite happy using my daw. She still prefers her Switch and that is just fine with me.

For my wife, my daw is a printer.

Edited September 19, 2019 by Gswitz

[Starship Krupa]

On 9/18/2019 at 1:54 PM, razor7music said:

ideally, you don't want your DAW to have an Internet connection due to unwanted exposure to malicious attacks

 

On 9/18/2019 at 1:54 PM, razor7music said:

I don't know if this best practice is still practical. Thoughts?

Short answer: no, it is not now, nor has it ever been necessary to unplug your computer from the Internet for DAW use. At least not if you are following the most basic guidelines for avoiding malware infection and data loss on the system.

Longer answer:

I am a former IT security professional and I promise you, I  never saw such a cautious (nervous) bunch until I started reading DAW forums!

It's pretty unusual for the workstation of a rocket scientist or biochemist to be behind an airgap, heck, for their servers to be behind airgaps ("airgap" means  the system is physically disconnected from access to the Internet). It's actually harmful for systems to be offline and allow their software to become out of date, fall behind in patches, etc.

Who is spreading this terror? Has any recording magazine such as Tape Op run an article or something suggesting that this was "best practice," or was it just "some guy(s) on an Internet forum?" A bunch of people said so therefore it became "true?"

Think about this. Have you experienced or even read or heard a verifiable story of a hobby, semi-pro, or pro recording studio experiencing loss or theft of data due to a "malicious attack" on a DAW system that happened because the computer was connected to the Internet? I'm asking because I haven't. Maybe you have. The largest and most tragic loss of data I'm aware of was at a facility that was storing it in analog form, the fire at Universal.

What data do you keep on your DAW computer that a data thief would think worth stealing? How would a thief become aware that it was there (I know, BandLab Assistant?)?

Of course you know not to blindly run email attachments and browse sketchy porn sites and the like on your DAW computer. Do you have a robust anti-malware scanner installed that you can run every so often? Is your system behind a router/firewall? Does your system have Windows built-in firewall enabled (the answer is yes for the majority of computers connected to the Internet). Do you make backups of your project/audio/data files on separate media? How about installation files/media for your software? Software keys?

If you are a pro or semi-pro, have you spent an hour or two outlining  how you would get your DAW system back up and running if a large hairy man came into your studio with a sledgehammer and smashed your computer to bits? And if he did that 5 minutes from now, how many minutes/hours/days' work would be gone forever due to backup intervals? These last two questions are the most important of all (especially if your studio is in the American Pacific Northwest, where large hairy men run rampant).

Do you know that even Windows 10 Home allows you to schedule updates so that they only happen outside certain hours of the day? And that you can set it so that even during that time, if it detects that you are working and it has an update, it will defer the update? This is how I have my system set up.

I have had situations where LatencyMon detected that my ethernet driver was causing latency issues, and disabling the card would have ended the troubles. Instead, what I did was a bit of sleuthing and wound up rolling the driver back a revision and the problem went away. The issue was not that I was running with the network enabled, it was that I had a malfunctioning driver. This might be how the "you should always turn off wi-fi when you're doing DAW work" thing started.

You don't need an airgap for DAW use, never did as long as you take the basic steps to ensure your computer doesn't get malware on it. It's not even a good idea, as your plug-ins and other software will start to get behind on patch level, then the next time you do connect the system to the Internet, you'll sit for an hour while all this stuff downloads and installs.

As far as network activity being a source of dropouts, it shouldn't as long as your network adaptor is properly configured. It's just another bit of hardware.

One thing that I found that was causing undue overhead was Windows 10's built-in malware program's default setting of scanning every file as it's read from the disk. I used Group Policy Editor to disable realtime scanning and only do scheduled scans.

[Starship Krupa]

On 9/19/2019 at 3:16 AM, Gswitz said:

My wife and kid can both log in to my daw.

As long as each person has their own user account it's fine.

[Gswitz]

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

As long as each person has their own user account it's fine.

Yes they have separate accounts.