Win 8 first look

[tvrgeek]

I would not be upgrading from XP-64 except I am buying a new system. Passmark says it should be about 10X the speed, so that will help the Spice runs a bunch.

The e-mu 1616m driver loaded just below the onboard video. After some time on playback, it would crash the video. Memory leak. I even found a reference on a site down under admitting it.

Ironic; I bought the full external M-Audio Profire so I would not get obsoleted due to internal buss issues. What a surprise everyone just dropped Firewire.

[tubelab.com]

I would not be upgrading from XP-64

Interesting. At the time I abandoned XP-64 EMu had only beta 64 bit drivers for their cards. I couldn't make one work, so I got the Audiophile 2496.

I can't say for sure what driver I am currently running on the Vista 64 box, since I had to jump through a few hoops to make it work. It is still unstable....sometimes it takes 1 or 2 reeboots to get audio, or remove the stutter, but once it is working it is usually OK. The 1820M is a cool tool when it works though. I can plug my turntable into the phono inputs and rip vinyl to 24/96 WAV. I can also record 8 microphones simultaneously in Sonar or play back 8 simultaneous tracks.

I tried everything I could to make it work in 7 to no avail. I tried 3 different computers and a dozen or so hardware combinations.

What a surprise everyone just dropped Firewire.

Firewire never really took off on Wintel like it did on Mac. I use some vintage HP equipment at work that runs Firewire so I keep an old Dell XP32 box under my desk.

[Pano]

I use Firewire 800 a lot for the transfer of large video files (50-70 gig each). For that it works great. USB-3 seems to be just as fast and is cheaper, easier.

[tvrgeek]

Maybe in a few years we can get the interface boxes that are on Firewire now available on USB 3. Until then, it is a game in getting the Win 7 legacy driver to load under 8. From some brief searching, it looks like it is possible.

[Pano]

What I don't understand is this:

Originally Posted by tvrgeek

As Spice, GoldWave, Groove Mechanic, and SoundEasy do a pretty good job of bringing my current XP to its knees,

I run GoldWave, Spice, Photoshop, ARTA, HOLMImpulse, Audacity, Video Editing and many other programs on my XP machine. It's just a Dell tower with dual 1.6 GHz processor and 2G of RAM. No trouble at all. Maybe I don't hit it as hard as you do?

[Wavebourn]

Originally Posted by bnorrish

I like Windows 8. Start button = Full screen Tiles - too much aido about the Start menu. I am an PC enthusiast but my wife a casual user likes as well. Very stable, performs very well. A bit of a learning curve on the UI but nothing real difficult. Did you try to call M-Audio for support on your Profire 610? It would be there responsibility to provide drivers for Windows 8. With Windows 8 Hyper-v, you can run Ubuntu as a virtual desktop if you like. MAC OS in Hyper-v is possible in theory, but not legal from Apple licensing

I have no problem in running them in KVMs under CentOS 6.3, what is the purpose of paying money to Microsoft for running more advanced OSes on top of it?

[tvrgeek]

I am not a big fan of VM's. Mostly because of inefficient use of resources. You will lose 20% off the top and more for socket to socket, As much as 60% if your VM spans chassis, and that is for the rare HV that can. Why should I buy a 6 core chip when all I wind up with is a 2 core VM? Their big advantage is flexibility. That is truly a big deal. I am more about performance. Very impatient you know. I will take a bare metal grid over a VM based cloud any day.

[bnorrish]

At home, I want a physical for gaming for graphics performance, audio but it I nice to have a secondary Vm of Ubuntu or Windows Server for testing. Beats have 3 chassis under my desk with kvm liked the old days using 500+ watts. I did not need to heat my office in the winter.

At work, I oversee 1300 servers - 90% virtual. It would cost millions more if we needed to be all physical. Power consumption savings are huge. Most applications do not need physical. Oracle and high-end SQL are the few exceptions. Developers will say they need SSD, high GPU, etc. but the numbers do not justify their need for "performance". No VM hypervisor spans vms across hosts (chassis) - VMware, Hyper-v, XenServer but they can move between host with little impact. Inefficiency would be running 1300 physicals with less than 5% cpu utilization.

[tvrgeek]

I too deal with big data at work but am not at liberty to discuss it. I would challenge some of your assertions, and strongly agree with others.

Now, I will still tell the wife I really do need that SSD