Recent experiences with PC/Win10?

Performance & Techniques Music Production
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Recent experiences with PC/Win10?

Please no Mac vs. PC BS. I’ll just block you because my actual answer is they both suck and Linux is superior in every way except for running music apps.

I’ve been on Mac and Linux since 2004 for music and non-music things respectively. I’m still happy with my hackintosh (it’s been my absolute best OS X experience, bar none). But my last MBP died a while ago. And, I’m kind of missing being able to do music things on a laptop. Unfortunately, I absolutely hate the last few years’ of MBPs dropping all of the useful connections and requiring a docking station or adapters. It’s a price I’m not willing to pay.

What’s it like on Win10 these days? Are there hoops you have to jump through to get music apps to work right (Priorities are Wavelab, Pro Tools, Traktor, and Maschine in that order; Plugins are mostly iZotope, Brainworx, and NI)? Is DPC latency behind us? Do automatic updates still screw everything up? Can you actually turn them off yet? How well does Windows do Hi-DPI scaling? Is it as slick as the way OS X or Linux works with 4k displays?

(Contrary to popular opinion, I actually prefer the way Linux does it…get rid of a bunch of the eye candy, use a huge font, and literally everything just works…it’s one of the reasons I consider it superior.)

The rest of my non-music life is easiest either in a Linux VM or one of my other Linux PCs, so there’s no real concern there.

Is there any reason to think that a Razer Blade 4k (when it comes out) won’t do everything I need? Are there other things I should look at (wanting 8th gen i7, upgradeable RAM and SSD, and a preferably matte 4k display)?

Is it worth paying for a windows license to try stuff out on my existing hardware? And, related to the last question, how do you actually buy Windows these days? Would it be easiest to just go to a Microsoft store?

Thanks…

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Most everything runs pretty stable on Win10 right now, but Im still using Win 8.1 Enterprise in both my production and DJ VM’s. It’s just still more stable. That being said, Win 8.1 is also less of a resource hog and doesnt have the issues that Win10 seems to have with virtualization (including recognizing multiple device ID’s and addressing them seperately within VMWare for some reason).

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Windows 10 super stable. All i do before plugging in is put on the airport mode. Audio stuff i use is mainly Traktor & Audition. CPU usage bar in Traktor totally flatlined for the most part.

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Windows 10 very stable for me. Using a Lenovo Y700. Only gripe I have is that the new focusrite USB drivers do a weird thing where I here some static in my system, but it’s usually fixed when I change the buffer size. Also could be because I run Voicemeeter

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Are you all using a fresh, unoptimised install of Win10?

I’ve had some problems, and get a loud click/pop in my speakers/headphones when shutting down…

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I tweak the F*** out of mine mate. SSD though.

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I’m running it on a 256GB SSD, and have it tweaked too. Not entirely convinced that the tweaks are necessary, though… What tweaks have you done? Any non-obvious services stooped/set to manual start?

From memory, I think I followed Black Vipers tweaks…

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Just found this:

Sounds like it might be useful (and very current!)

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Mind a rundown of what kind of tweaks?

The test machine will be an older x230. Current config:
OS: Arch Linux
Kernel: x86_64 Linux 4.17.5-1-ARCH
Uptime: 26m
Packages: 723
Shell: zsh 5.5.1
Resolution: 1366x768
WM: herbstluftwm
CPU: Intel Core i5-3360M @ 4x 3.5GHz [47.0_C]
GPU: intel
RAM: 1559MiB / 15861MiB

It should work okay from what I see.

Wait…so you’re running DJ software in a VM? Is it on Hyper-V? I was under the impression that it still wasn’t a preferred option…

Interesting…I might have to look at that.

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Well, I did it. My old X230 is running Win10. It’s the first time I’ve voluntarily run Windows in 14 years.

Quick lessons:

  1. Logging in with a PIN is freaking stupid. So is authenticating over the internet. And not being able to set a login password separate from your MS account. Seriously, “security” on windows is still retarded.

  2. Wavelab and most of the plugins work. And thankfully, I’ve got authorizations left for anything that’s not on an iLok/eLicenser (which I honestly prefer). The ones that “don’t work” haven’t been installed yet.

  3. Traktor appears to function. But I have no idea how to migrate my track collection without using iTunes. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I’m thinking about moving it all into dropbox and letting it happen as automatically as possible.

  4. The iTunes installer from the windows store doesn’t work. Most of the reviews talk about it failing at the “permissions” stage, but it doesn’t even get that far for me. Apparently, that’s one more thing Microsoft can’t do right. Seriously, what’s wrong with just downloading an installer from the vendor like every decent company?! It’s not like iTunes has any copy protections.

  5. I miss herbstluftwm. I keep typing key commands that don’t do things or do the wrong things.

  6. There are other reasons I want to like it, and I’m sure I can get to the point that it’s usable. But man they do things dumb.

  7. Hyper-V still advertises features that it doesn’t seem to implement.

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I am using VMWare workstation. Hyper V does not live up to expectations… ever

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Fair enough. I’ve used it and liked it okay in the past. But always just as a user, not as an admin.

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Oh yeah…I was supposed to be using this account.

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So…on the same laptop running largely the same applications, Win10 is noticeably slower than Linux for day-to-day stuff. But wavelab seems to work fine except that it defaulted to using the non-ASIO drivers for some stupid reason. At least it boots in about the same amount of time.

I still haven’t gotten a chance to actually test Traktor because Dropbox is taking forever…it keeps saying “2 minutes left” and then starting to download more files instead of just giving me a realistic estimate. I haven’t noticed that behavior on OS X or Linux. Also, Win10 defaults to sleeping the computer after a while even on battery power, so the transfer didn’t happen overnight like I planed.

I haven’t bothered installing Live yet, but I’m not sure if there even are virtual sound cards for Windows that have enough channels for the effects setup I use on OS X…fortunately, I don’t care that much.

I figured out how to use a password over a pin (use a local account and disable pin).

It’s still a mixed bag. But, it’s still not as bad as my last experience with Windows. So, there’s that.

This experiment is probably going to come down to comparing what’s actually available this fall when the upgrade happens…it looks like the 15" MBPs got upgraded, but there are 4K gaming laptops that have hardware at least as good…and despite the fact that I’d probably scale it to 2560x1440…that’s still better than the MBP can do. And they still have real ports instead of just USB-C. So I won’t have to glue a docking station to it.

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Some more weirdness…

Traktor, wavelab, plugins, etc. appear to all work just fine. So, there’s that.

Powershell and cmd are flat out incapable of doing part of what I need to do for my day job. Doing those things in Windows as opposed to OS X or Linux literally turns a 10-second task into a 2-minute task, which gets performed 40ish times/day. So, it would make it so slow that I literally could not finish work in the time allotted. As far as what I’ve tried, Windows is the only OS that has these problems.

Hyper-V and Virtualbox cannot happily coexist on the same system.

Hyper-V has some major networking issues. Microsoft acknowledged them for 2008 server versions. The fixes do not work for Win10.

After disabling Hyper-V, Virtualbox still has limitations that I don’t want to deal with.

…which means I’m down to VMWare Workstation…which adds $250 to the price of Windows computers…assuming I don’t want their tech support. I’ve used it in the past, but that was with an Educational license that was free.

Or dual-booting. Which is and always will be a PITA.

And the MBPs just got upgraded to 8th gen processors, including i9s. And I initially misread it’s native resolution. It’s fine…a little low, but fine.

And all of the VM things I’m having problem with, I’ve done on an OS X host without the problems.

Right now, I’m happy I did the experiment. In the short term, this computer will end up getting wiped (again) and dual-booting archlinux and win10. In the long run, despite the problems OS X has been having, the premium they charge, and the absolutely asinine hardware design…I think that a 15" MBP with a docking station glued to the lid might actually win.

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What is your future use of the computer going to be?

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This computer? It’ll probably be dedicated to DJ use at home until it dies. If not, it’ll get recycled/donated after pulling the drive(s).

The new computer would ideally be an “everything” laptop…which involves some studio stuff (either windows or OS X works), day job (must be Linux or OS X), and what I call normal daily use (Linux). If I could get away with gaming a bit as well, that’d be cool, but it’s a super-low priority. I generally prefer console gaming because I don’t care that much, and I don’t do it very often.

The reason is just that my Hackintosh is getting a bit long in the tooth (I think I built it in 2012 and haven’t upgraded anything except the monitor). And, as a result, OS X updates can be a little weird and are taking more and more work. At this point, the upgrades I would do are almost the cost of a new one. And because video cards have changed, it’s not that much less than either a MBP or a high-end PC that would just about match performance of what I could build.

My only remaining laptop is from 2011. It works fine, but it’s going to die at some point. And it’s time to move it to a backup or low-priority role.

Also, I got annoyed having to wait for a furniture delivery today and ended up making the x230 dual boot windows 10 and arch linux, which was easier than I remembered. Then again, the last time I did it was around 2012 on a MBP. So, it makes sense that it got easier…if you use systemd-boot, the archlinux installer (for being so ‘manual’) does almost all of the heavy lifting for you.

Anyway…that means I can do all the things with the laptop now and continue the testing. It also might be a way forward if the PC makes sense. Though a part of me thinks it would be funny to glue at least a USB 3 hub onto a MBP. I kind of want a wired LAN port as well, but I don’t use it that often.

ETA:

Yeah…it looks like Win10 is going to work for everything except my day job. Which is a little weird, but acceptable. I actually kind of like some of it…