XP audio account setup

[Fleghand]

So I have set up an account for XP, Audio, and I am wondering how best to go about disabling all unnecessary and background programs. So far I have tweaked the options of the individual programs themselves, but some still persist at startup, and have no obvious way of setting them to off (Real Player, for example).

Should I be playing with any init. files, or whatnot? Also, should this account be set to administrator? It seems that as I clean up the start menu, for example, I am affecting the other account. I am not sure what to do in these cases. Basically, I suppose I just need to turn off any background programs, right?

Let me know, if you can.
Thanks

[Fleghand]

Hey, fancy-nice....

now, I notice that this is not relative to each account, it affects the whole system, ie. startup for both accounts. It seems that I will nonetheless have to manually disable the viruscan, for example, when I am booting up the audio account. There must be a way to tweak what's loaded at startup for both accounts, no?


...and what out of all that long list do I need to disable and not??

[MrM]

dual boot is a better way IMHO.

[Fleghand]

that requires a seperate install on a new partition... not a bad idea, but ain't there no other way around it?..
let's try to save the disk space for the actual projects


as you can see, I'm a little anxious to resolve this; very good suggestions so far...

[Joe Hannigan]

Originally posted by Fleghand
let's try to save the disk space for the actual projects

Use your C drive for the OS and APPs, use your D, E, F., etc. drives for "projects" - wav data, avi's, dx plugins, templates, etc. It's a lot less taxing on your system's C drive, as well, and your overall workflow will improve. It just doesn't make sense to be reading/writing to the C drive constantly. Let the other drives do the data-handling for your projects.

[Fleghand]

As it stands, I already have the disk partitioned thusly: that there are three main sections, one for projects files, one for finished files, and one for OS and apps. What I am concerned with is that I will have to create ANOTHER partition (taking away space) for the OTHER XP.

Is there no way to make seperate startup options for each account? That one would only load certain programs at startup, while the other would load different ones, and not the others that the other account uses? So far I've tried using both as administrator accounts, perhaps I need to change the status and stuff... anyway, I'm still trying to check out the windows help files, so I dunno... maybe someone here already knows (I'm sure of it, in fact).

thanks all

[MrM]

Several partitions on 1 drive will not make things faster; simply get yourself multiple harddrives.

I've talked a little about it here:
http://www.audioforums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10784

Disclaimer, I will not say 'dualboot is THE best there is'.
But it is very good IMHO.

[Joe Hannigan]

Partitioning is NOT the same as multiple drives. You're still making the C drive do all the work, no matter how many ways you split it up, and your'e still making one HD servo do all the work of finding & playing back audio files. OS, applications, etc.

Put your audio (and video) files on an entirely physically separate HD. You'll see an overall improvement in throughput, less lockups, bottlenecks and hardware failures.

[Fleghand]

Near future purchase could be a firewire drive, but for now I am running on a laptop.

Anyway, the question I am asking is whether or not I can tweak individual startup options for each account.

I am looking into this in windows newsgroups, I'll let you all know what my research turns up.

[crankz1]

I wouldn't worry to much about setting up different user accounts.
Instead, you could look into setting up separate hardware profiles for the different manners in which you intend to use your computer or as has been mentioned dual boot.
I used to run separate accounts on one of the general purpose machines I have, but doing so seemed to slow the machine down. Now all of my computers have just the one Administrator account .... even the guest account is turned off.
With the laptop that I also have ... a 700MHz PIII HP, I've set up a separate hardware profile for DAW use, disabling unneeded devices (NIC, Modem, Internal soundcard ...etc) and Services. Some very good information on hardware profiles and XP Services can be found at Black Viper (http://www.blackviper.com/) .
Your near future purchase of an external FireWire drive is a very good idea for your audio data. Asking that little laptop drive to do all the work of running the OS, programs and stream the audio data is a bit much. Specially since most laptop drives only spin at 4200 to 5400 RPM's. Though many of the newest laptops have the option of a 7200 RPM drive. That's still a lot of work for one drive.

HTH