With the advent of multicore support in Renoise I have begun my quest to find a laptop to replace my current one. So I went to the Zepto website to see what they had to offer…Ugh…Only Vista is supported with their new laptops. And I really like Zepto’s performance/price ratio, but now I am not sure…
Anybody on this board have experience with running Vista as a audio workstation ?
Pros for using Vista
From what I understand, Taktik is developing Renoise on Vista. I take that as a good sign
There was some talk about a yet-to-be-supported Vista-only improved audio architecture. Renoise is going to support it. Good stuff too. Perhaps even a good enough reason to get an OEM license in the first place?
The bad news are:
The driver for my M-Audio Firewire Audiophile is currently in BETA state
No service pack released for Vista (yet). In other words - it’s full of bugs!
i’m running vista side by side to my old xp installation since quite a while.
renoise is running under vista just as normal as it does on XP.
however, i didn’t touch vista for ages because of several reasons:
vista will always be the slower OS - even if you disable all the eye candy and superflous stuff.
for further information refer to this article.
drivers for my emu1212m are still beta
it requires way more RAM than XP, which automatically leaves less resources for renoise and all other applications.
in my opinion, the system preference settings are more widely scattered across more seperate screens than in XP - it’s sometimes really cumbersome to simply disable the monitor sleep function (just for example).
but for me, the real reason not to go vista is what i mentioned as the first point of my short list.
that alone will keep my XP alive as long as it’s possible, which means until i’m forced to make the switch because essential software is no longer compatible to XP.
if you ever get the chance to make a 1:1 comparison of some benchmark or software which gives you numeric values usable for this purpose, then make your compare just as i did: vista does everything slower. and unfortunately that is a circumstance which is not related to weak drivers or something which will be improved in the future with some kind of update - it’s simply because vista always has some nasty content protection running under its roof and decrypts whatever is running in the background of your OS.
so to get the highest benefit from your hardware, i can only recommend to get that vista laptop, “format c” and install XP - then you know at least that your hardware is used for what you really intend to use it for at its full potential.
And yeah, I read about the encryption thing… I just hope the MS-DRM thing never really become a standard (people, unite!).
I don’t to make the switch, but everybody may be forced to do so sooner or later. So thanks for the advice, Keith. I will make the switch once XP is phased out by hardware support
I guess I am going to look elsewhere. A shame, it was such a nice computer, and cheap too. And I’m not willing to go with a computer that Zepto said had no XP support (I believe those people)
You don’t own a laptop / are considering to buy one, by any chance?
Heh…Funny thing…I just came across a Macbook offer, Core 2 Duo 2Ghz with 2GB of RAM. So I guess it is time to experience Renoise on “that other OS”. If you are going to see me perform in the nearby future, I might bring Renoise (WIN) and Renoise (OSX) on stage simultaneously
bear in mind that using renoise on mac might imply abandoning the majority of your potentially used plugins due to incompatability / non-existant ports for that respective OS.
i don’t know too many renoise mac users, but the one i know recently decided to buy an additional WinTel again, merely for using renoise beyond the mac-os limitations.
That’s odd… He could install windows on that machine… I agree some of the plugins are not available for the Mac. I do miss some of the freebee’s vst’s but then again if you make an effort you find loads of free stuff for the Mac too. Tough I wish the dude of Superwave made a port to the Mac. That thing is so full of odd little funky querks (is that a word?) that I sometimes reboot into windows just to hear it again.
I just hope the MS-DRM thing never really become a standard (people, unite!).