[windows] My S4 Diary: Prepping for and setting up my S4

[IrishBlaggard]

great post, have bookmarked for a proper read later. thanks

[VanGogo]

I'm with Karlos

EPIC POST

Very thorough! Good work!

[Quenepas]

posts like this deserve some sort of prop/thumbsup/star system. They are very helpful!

[Karlos Santos]

I added some Tags and 5star rated it.
Over to you guys.

[Nicky H]

Yep good post fella - shows ya don't need a really powerful pc if you know what you're doing - should be stickied

[Rukks]

So you can boot either into your s4 partition or your regular windows 7 partition?

I like that idea if that is the case. May need to get a larger hard drive for that though.

[smiTTTen]

Yes, when you go through the Windows install it provides you with an option to partition off your disk. To do that you delete all the existing partitions (all the data is erased to make sure you have everything backed up first) and then create your 2 partitions. Windows will also add a couple of very small system partitions but you can ignore them. You then select a partition to install your first copy Windows 7. Once you have gone through that installation you start again only you leave the partitions alone. You select the unused partition to install your 2nd copy of Windows on and go through the install again.

When Windows boots up after the 2 partitions are installed it will recognize that there are two Windows systems and will provide you with a choice as to which one you want to go into. As first it can be tough to tell which partition is which as they have the same name. You can rename each instance of Windows quite easily.

Boot into one of the instances, say the one you plan to set up for the S4. Go to the Accessories menu and right click on Command Line and select “Run as Administrator” Then all you have to do is paste in the following:

bcdedit /set {current} Description "Your instance name here"

I used:
bcdedit /set {current} Description "Win7 DJ-Production"


To change the name of the other you will need to restart and boot into that as this command only affects the current partition.
You can also go into Control Panel > System> Advanced Properties>Startup & Recovery and define which is the default instance. That will be the one that loads up if you fail to make a selection at boot time. I set my non-Traktor instance as the default to make sure that I only use it when I am actively using the S4. It’s also a good idea to use different login users and colour schemes to clearly delineate one instance from another. It’s amazing how easy it is to boot into the wrong instance!

[Scaper7]

Nice of you to share that info in such detail. Thanks. Useful setup regardless what you're running.

While this might be slightly off topic, I can't help notice the cyclic spiking/cpu loading in all the screenshots. Do you/anyone have any idea what it's about? I did battle with same symptom on an AK1 and could not fix it. Considering the software is idle, that kind of CPU loading is extreme. What's causing it?

[tekki]

Even thinking of makinf this sticky for windows users.

[tekki]

Done!