Running a Lean, Mean Music Machine

This installment of "Geek Speak" is affording me the chance to rant and rave about a total pet-peeve of mine that I acquired while working as a computer technician in a local Computer Renaissance store. System Resources! How to get more at your disposal with out spending money, and how to keep them available.

I used to get SOOOOOOOO ticked off when people would buy a PC from us, then 2 weeks later they would come in the store pissin' and moanin' "This piece of crap PC you sold me is soooo slow I can't get anything done" whine, whine, whine, and tell me how it's all my fault, and don't I know anything about what I am doing. Then, the moment where I get vindicated, I put their PC up on my bench and start it up...HA! When it starts, their taskbar (down by the clock) has an Anti-Virus app loading, 2 or 3 of these stupid instant messenger things running, RealPlayer and Real Juke box may be there, maybe a firewall Like Norton Personal Firewall and God only knows what else.

And they wonder why the PC is slow...

Ultimately, I can't get to mad, because not everyone knows what the taskbar is, or what the impact of it is. Therefore, I am taking this opportunity to explain it.

Each little icon that lives down by the system clock on a Windows-based PC taking up a certain amount of system resources. Each of those apps is actually sittin gin the background of your system...running...not at full power, but it is running. For example, how many people use DirectCD from Adaptec, what it does is just sit there running in the background waiting for you to put in a CD, whenever you do, it sees it and looks to see if it is a DirectCD formatted CD, if it is, it open the DirectCD app, if not, it goes back to sleep and waits for the next CD.

Instant messengers is another common one, when it is sitting there in the taskbar it is just monitoring you internet connection waiting for you to log on, when you do, it opens up, hooks up to the IM's server and starts watching all your buddies to see if they log in.

Some apps, like RealPlayer, the freeware browser NeoPlanet (which rocks, by the way) just sit there with the app running in a sort of "sleep mode", what this does is allows the program to fully open quicker when you actually want to use it.

So here are the issues they could bring with them...

When you have a couple running, like say and Anti-Virus and some Instant Messenger, probably no big deal, right? But if you have a lot running, that can totally drain down your system just with whats running in the taskbar. When I was at Computer Renaissance we kept a running tally of the current record for most apps running in the taskbar, when I left the record was 15! 15 APPS ALL RUNNING IN THE BACKGROUND! And that was one of the customers that told me what a crappy PC I built him!

Now, as far as us musician's go, on a PC that is running on too low of resources, this will start meaning dropouts and such during recording as you Anti-Virus decides to make one of it's quick, behind-the-scene's system scans or other background tasks take place.

So, here is how I manage my resources on my music machine...look at the apps you have running. Do you really use them so much they need to be running all the time. RealPlayer, in my opinion is the biggest offender of the "Arrogant Programmer" problem. By default it installs itself to run in the background and come up in the boot. Not only that, but sometimes Real Jukebox starts too. Now how many of us really use RealPlayer so much we need it running all the time, not many I would guess.

OK, so how do you get these annoyances out of the boot-time load?

If you are running a version of Windows 98 it's easy, if you go to Start>Run and type "msconfig" in the commend line, it brings up this groovy tool that you need to navigate to the start-up tab within. Here it lists all the apps that start when you boot, all you do is uncheck the apps you want to quit loading in the boot and restart the machine.

A less intrusive way to do it is set the preferences within each app, in RealPlayer, for example, just disable the "StartCenter" in the general preferences dialog. Most programs that register themselves to load automatically when Windows start have an option to disable it in their preferences somewhere, but some don't. If it does, it would be wiser to disable it there, but with msconfig you can do it all in one place.

There are also many shareware application that will control your boot allowing you to disable some boot-time apps. Just search them out, there are really to many out there to list them.

Well, I hope my ranting and raving helped some of you understand the importance of running a lean PC when recording. The best option is always just not to install tons of junk on yur PC, it is best to have a PC for music, and another for all your games and internet and stuff, but ultimately that is sometimes just not practical, so with care you can use one machine for all. Just maintain it properly, keep it lean and use common sense...all will be well.