PC Notes
Technique : PC Notes
If you're thinking about a new PC, do you
need to make sure it's Windows Vista-ready? We examine the relevant
issues for the musician.
Microsoft are expected to have released yet another
Beta version of their forthcoming Vista operating system by the time you
read this, but as I write in early 2006, people intending to upgrade
their PC or buy a new one are already wondering whether it's worth
trying to make it Vista-compatible. After all, Microsoft hope to ship
Vista before the end of 2006, and most of us want a new PC to last at
least 18 months before it has to be pensioned off.
One of the most appealing visual reasons to upgrade
to Windows Vista will be this Flip 3D view, which lets you display all
the currently open windows and select one using the mouse scroll-wheel
or cursor keys.
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When Vista does ship, hordes of PC enthusiasts will
no doubt be queueing up to buy a copy, but those of us who have already
experienced the moves from Windows 3.1 to 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP will
probably take a more cautious stance. I expect the majority of musicians
to hold back for at least a month or two until the wrinkles have been
ironed out, and some may wait until the first Service Pack is released,
to cure the inevitable issues that only surface when large numbers of
people install a new operating system. Given that many of us primarily
use our PCs for making music, some may delay the move for even longer,
or perhaps not make it at all. Windows XP eventually proved to be by far
the most reliable Microsoft operating system to date for running audio
applications, and installing a significantly different OS can be a
gamble (look at the problems many musicians had at first when moving
from Windows 98 to XP, and from Mac OS 9 to OS X). It will be
unsurprising if some PC musicians are thinking that as XP ain't broke,
why fix it?
Moreover, Microsoft have announced that some of the
originally Vista-only features, such as Windows Media Player 11, with
its much faster database searching (handy if your on-line music library
runs to thousands of tracks), the more secure Explorer 7 browser with
tabbed pages, and some of the new Vista graphic features, will now also
become available to users of Windows XP Service Pack 2. If this all
comes to pass, there may not be quite the same urgency to buy a copy of
Vista.
Having said all this, it makes sense that any PC you
purchase now should be basically Vista-compatible, so that if you make
the move you don't have to scrap any components. The most fundamental
decision is the motherboard/chip-set, and since the most immediately
appealing feature of Vista is its 'Aero Glass' layered 3D look, with
transparency, significantly greater graphics power may be needed.
The GDI+ (Graphics Device Interface) sub-system used
by Windows XP to display information on screens and printers is being
replaced in Vista by a new 'desktop compositing engine' that relies on
Direct X. Although Vista will also include a Direct X 10 update, there's
currently no hardware available that fully supports its feature set, so
the minimum requirement for the full 'Aero Glass' experience at the
moment is a graphics card with hardware support for Direct X 9, plus at
least 64MB of video memory. However, 128MB would seem more sensible,
since minimum requirements often work but may not offer a smooth and
comfortable experience.
For those who might want to have lots of
simultaneous windows open, and use new features such as the Flip 3D View
(which gives you a perspective display of all open applications, as in
the screenshot above, so that you can flip through them with your mouse
scroll-wheel or cursor keys), 256MB or even more video RAM might be more
appropriate. However, it remains to be seen whether or not musicians
will object to the generally noisier cooling requirements of most of the
higher-end graphics cards.
I suspect that a PC with support for PCI Express is
likely to be the best option for taking advantage of all the new graphic
features, because the x16 PCI Express graphics slot offers a much
greater bandwidth than the AGP slot. However, the graphics features can
be switched off (or, as Microsoft put it, "Windows Vista is the first
Windows operating system that has a user experience that can gracefully
scale to the hardware capabilities of the computer it is installed on"),
so don't despair if you've just bought a new PC based around the Nforce
3 or K8T800 Pro chip-sets, to avoid PCI Express audio problems.
The significant performance improvements offered by
dual-core processors mean that they are probably a must for partnering
with Vista, especially as the popular dual-core ranges from AMD and
Intel offer 64-bit as well as 32-bit capability (Vista is expected to
ship on a DVD-ROM with 32-bit and 64-bit versions in the same box). Many
industry experts are hopeful that 64-bit driver support will be much
more widespread by the time Vista ships as well, so that may be the time
to move over to a fully 64-bit system, abandoning any hardware items
that still don't have suitable drivers.
We can expect a bigger RAM requirement for Vista,
with 1GB as a practical minimum, although 2GB is already becoming the
new standard for DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations). If you opt for the
full 64-bit experience it's also much easier to install 4GB and above.
That will be a big help for musicians frustrated that they have to rely
on streaming data from a hard drive when it could be accessed much more
quickly if loaded into system RAM.
Hard drive requirements aren't likely to change
significantly: the hard drive demands of a music computer are more
dependent on your sampling and audio needs than on your operating
system, so the typical 80GB system drive and 120GB+ audio drive will
still probably be perfectly adequate — although I expect 80GB drives to
become increasingly scarce. However, faster SATA II models are likely to
become more popular. Although most musicians don't need to combine
drives into a RAID array for extra speed, the contents of large drives
are increasingly tedious to keep regularly backed up, so redundant RAID
setups, where one drive in the array can fail completely without you
losing any data, will probably become more popular (apart from the extra
noise).
Microsoft are also encouraging drive manufacturers
to develop 'hybrid drives', with much larger non-volatile caches of
128MB or more. Such designs will at first only be supported by Vista,
but will allow frequently used files to be stored for very rapid
retrieval. You could use this approach to enable Vista-equipped PCs to
boot up or launch your most often-used applications more quickly. Intel
have also suggested a similar scheme, but this time with their 'Robson'
non-volatile cache mounted on the motherboard, so you could boot from
that. It's even rumoured that Apple have already incorporated Robson
technology into a new model of laptop.
To sum up, I'm cautiously suggesting that to be
fully equipped for both Vista and audio recording and playback you'll
need a PC fitted with a dual-core processor, PCI Express slots, 2GB RAM,
a PCI Express graphics card with 128MB or more video RAM, a DVD drive,
and a hard drive of whatever capacity you want for your audio. If you're
not particularly convinced that 3D graphics will enhance your
music-making experience, PCI Express probably isn't so important, but if
you are, it might be worth waiting until PCI Express cards supporting
Direct X 10 appear.
For the musician, it's the performance of MIDI + Audio applications that should determine whether or not we adopt Vista, but I'm almost certain that the major music developers are already getting busy with the latest Vista Beta release, so that they can have updates or upgrades of their applications available within a short time of the official Vista launch. This may be an ideal opportunity to offer new features (such as transparent mixer windows floating over the arrange page) allied to Vista's strengths.
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