And of course, not all PCs are equal. You can not have too much RAM. More cores are better. There is a huge difference between a typical low-end laptop with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM, and an engineering workstation desktop PC with dual i7 processors, 24 cores and 64 GB of RAM. A machine like that can do several CPU intensive tasks, and be doing a full virus scan, and be doing a hard drive backup, all at the same time, and still have plenty of reserve capability.
But it might be cheaper to have several small dedicated PCs assigned to specific jobs rather than a high end (expen$$ive) machine to do everything...
Yea you can if you go into services you can disable the update service and background task monitor. At least that is how I've always done it. My current desk top that I built back in October is running Windows 10 and I haven't tried to disable the update service on it but I'm sure I could.
The internet is the quickest way to ruin a perfectly good working computer. If you aren't going to ever let a computer out on the net you can strip away so much of what bogs a system done like anti virus software and all of the networking components and Micro soft "end user" metrics (AKA data mining).
If you have deep pockets you can always opt for one of these. It will only set you back 9 grand.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/ryzen-threadripper
First thing I do is turn off everything I can.
Can't DAW applications and the like run on Linux? Never looked but it's stable so I thought it would be a no brainer for studios, but it's not my world so I dunno.
I find this is true. One of my servers is Z77 based running W7 and have no interest in changing it. My old main PC is W8 and going into the BR. Bit of overkill to play on the net, but it's free and uses some of the drives as another data backup location. My living room will be the HTPC, the audio controller PC and a DAW on 3 separate machines.
Well, part of the reason to invest in a PC based solution must be to stream from it as well? and have it as media center.
I use a dedicated PC as a music server/streamer. It is a $240 5" x 5" mini-box, with 6 USB ports, a low-end Intel Gemini Lake J4115 Quad Core processor, 1 TB hard drive. It's only job is to serve the bit stream to my USB DAC. It works great. This is what I meant by a "small dedicated PC assigned to a specific job".
Not mine. In fact i think i see those pc as dedicated custom box doing the same thing a 19" rack could do.
I think the first time i opened my samplers and understood they were dedicated pc ( Kurzweil K2000R so obvious it is a pc!) It biased my view.
Of course with 'big' config you can do more things and multitask can now be envisaged but i don't see the point in investing a lot of money for an overkill machine:
It'll cost even more to cool it down quietly.
Better select a lower consumption cpu and invest money in case/psu/ram imho. I agree with Hifijim, a lot of ram is very nice.
That said i'm not for the multiplication of computers. Two at same time is my limit in my living room( ok maybe three or four when making music)).
I've already way too much gear in it ( because i like analog ( and djing) too so i have another analog dedicated chain in //with three TT, a dj mixer,... too much gear.)
