My east west/pro tools/computer brainstorm

[t4mh]

I'm on a Media Center XP machine, myself, and running (among other things) Gigastudio, which is (technically) not supported on Media Center PCs. So far, so good; it works for me, knock wood. I run Tracktion native, and could give neither a fig, nor even a date for ProTools. One man's opinion, heh.

Right, but its an XP backboned machine.
Keith

[charlie2]

I quess my os is xp media center.

Anyway...my plan so far is to try to put pro tools 8 in my computer along with the east west and see what happens. (or should I just upgrade to pt 7.4?)

If it doesn't work, I'll go back to my original set up till I get a new computer for the new software.

What do ya think of this idea?

[t4mh]

Several Issues

1) XP is going on 7 to 8ish years old and so are the processors in the PCs that were made to run it. Maybe a little newer...maybe yours is more toward the newer end of that. I know that E/W wants processing power to run effectively and while I'm not a ProTools user, I'd guess that there were users out there using ProTools on XP PCs when XP came out and was the latest OS. I would think that if you have a ProTools version that was designed to run on XP then it would do so. The E/W site says their most modern stuff will run on XP but they also have "recommended specs" that you should probably check out.

2) Ram - Not sure how much you have. XP was designed to run on about 1GB of Ram but having more would be a good thing. If buying Ram, pay attention to your bus speed and XP being a 32bit OS you probably cannot have more than a total 4GB on your XPS. Vintage Ram may be difficult and expensive to find, I hope not.

So heres the deal Charlie. I have an old XP Pro desktop that was new sometime around 2003, I can't remember exactly when I bought it. I would not try to run E/W on that machine at all...My wife has a Vista 32 machine with an AMD CPU and while it runs all of her internet, facebook, email stuff, I wouldn't try running ANYTHING that requires horsepower on it. I also have one of the very first dual core processors that came out in late 2006, early 2007, running Vista 32 on a laptop. While this Vista machine is amazing in a lot of ways and still very useful for a lot of things, it is border line for being able to run E/W effectively and the main reason for my latest upgrade and change to Mac. You can try to run these things on an old machine and if you want to, if so then "full speed ahead"! But go into it with the idea that while it might run it all, it won't have anything close to killer performance and might very well be an exercise in frustration.

HTH
Keith