A lot of music makers are running some kind of DAW software on their Windows XP/Vista laptops (Cubase, Protools, Abbleton Live, Sonar etc.). The laptop is often also used for daily tasks like email reading, browsing the web and word processing. These tasks demand quite a different set of enabled features in the operating system. So basically we have two operating modes: Normal mode and music mode. Normal mode is what your laptop is in while browsing this site. (Hopefully) Secured, Firewalled and connected to the internet. So what do we want from our laptop when making music.
You want
- All processing power you can get for your music making you DAW and all the VST/DXI/RTAS plugins
- All hard drive throughput used for your audio tracks
- The shortest audio and midi latency possible for your computer/audio interface combination(Lower latency means more processing power needed)
You don’t need
- To be connected to the internet
So when making music there is no need for network access, Firewalls,
adblockers and real-time virusscanning - Indexing services like Google desktop
- Anything that’s not basic windows or non-music related software
You don’t want to be put out of your creative flow by Interruptions, crackles and noises caused by non music related background software Notifications (Email, Wifi, backups etc.)
Antivirus en Firewall software slowing you system down Windows updates bogging your system (you want them later though!)
Music Mode; Shut down unneeded processes
Wouldn’t it be great to have a button on your desktop that says: Go Into Music mode! When pushing this button all the above annoyances are temporarily shut off.Windows basically has two types of processes we can temporarily shut down safely:
Background Services
User processes
As this post advances i will try to explain how this can be done in a way not harmful to your computer. The performance gain for music making can be fenomenal (depending on your current configuration).
What is my laptop running?
Mark Russinovich of sysinternals created a good free program for examining system processes. It can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx
Understanding output of ProcXp demands a lot of technical knowledge. You don’t need to understand it all. Just look at whats running. Temporary disable services (until next reboot)We can do this using windows own "net" utility
NET STOP
Using PSKill to shut down programsAlso from sysinternals a handy utility called PSKill (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pskill.mspx)
PSKill -t
The problem
