No personal experience of Linux - but wife works as a lecturer in computing and she swears by it. tells me it is far more stable than Windows. In fact she refuses to us Windows on her own machine. Course you could also argue that my wife is an old dinosaur .. but i wouldn't dare saying anything like that! (She is beautiful really).
Could it be the hardware that's at fault? In which case, wouldn't Linux suffer from the same problem? Don't know, never used it, but I have WindowsXP and think it's great.
It gets harder and harder these days to isolate what's a hardware error and what's a software error. With the size of hard drives being used today, I've seen a lot of problems clear up by doing a scandisk and a defrag. If you've never done either, you may want to give it a try. Do the scandisk first, and have it repair any errors. Then when you're done, run defrag. You may want to start the defrag before going to bed. It could take a while.
My son does a lot of recording, and couldn't see using anything but a mac.
If you're doing any serious audio or video work it's good policy - essential I'd say - to turn off any background applications that aren't actually needed so as to maximise memory usage. Things like antivirus and antispyware applications for instance, and things like Google Desktop that are forever beavering away in the background. After a good defragging session (which I'm sure leaves a lot of useless stuff in memory using up precious RAM) do a cold boot (so as to get rid of rubbish in RAM), and turn off internet access and the things I've mentioned above.
If you look in the Windows Task Manager you'll see all manner of stuff and wonder why it's there. In WTM I'd look seriously at anything with your username attached to it and consider whether it could be usefully dumped while you doing your audio/video editing. Some are important, like explorer and soundman, and should be left alone. Don't touch anything with LOCAL SERVICE or SYSTEM attached to it unless you know exactly what you're doing.
As an example, at the moment I've got 27 applications in memory with my name attached to them; there are 3 (not including explorer) which between them account for 80MB of memory. I'd ditch these and a number of others if I was doing CPU/RAM-intensive work and save over 100MB of RAM.
I'd also work with sound/video files on a physically separate hard drive (not just a partition on the C drive) dedicated for that purpose. This will save a lot of thrashing around on the C drive and should speed things up appreciably - provided that drive is a separate internal drive and not a USB external drive (they tend to be slower and are really most useful for archiving).
Windows Media Player
Re: Windows Media Player
No personal experience of Linux - but wife works as a lecturer in computing and she swears by it. tells me it is far more stable than Windows. In fact she refuses to us Windows on her own machine. Course you could also argue that my wife is an old dinosaur .. but i wouldn't dare saying anything like that! (She is beautiful really).
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by Welshman
Re: Windows Media Player
Love Linux, cant stand windows. I found it easier and more reliable to use than the windows option. But thats only my opinion...
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by blas
Re: Windows Media Player
Could it be the hardware that's at fault? In which case, wouldn't Linux suffer from the same problem? Don't know, never used it, but I have WindowsXP and think it's great.
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by Mark Harmer
Re: Windows Media Player
It gets harder and harder these days to isolate what's a hardware error and what's a software error. With the size of hard drives being used today, I've seen a lot of problems clear up by doing a scandisk and a defrag. If you've never done either, you may want to give it a try. Do the scandisk first, and have it repair any errors. Then when you're done, run defrag. You may want to start the defrag before going to bed. It could take a while.
My son does a lot of recording, and couldn't see using anything but a mac.
Good luck.
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by nofrets
Re: Windows Media Player
If you're doing any serious audio or video work it's good policy - essential I'd say - to turn off any background applications that aren't actually needed so as to maximise memory usage. Things like antivirus and antispyware applications for instance, and things like Google Desktop that are forever beavering away in the background. After a good defragging session (which I'm sure leaves a lot of useless stuff in memory using up precious RAM) do a cold boot (so as to get rid of rubbish in RAM), and turn off internet access and the things I've mentioned above.
If you look in the Windows Task Manager you'll see all manner of stuff and wonder why it's there. In WTM I'd look seriously at anything with your username attached to it and consider whether it could be usefully dumped while you doing your audio/video editing. Some are important, like explorer and soundman, and should be left alone. Don't touch anything with LOCAL SERVICE or SYSTEM attached to it unless you know exactly what you're doing.
As an example, at the moment I've got 27 applications in memory with my name attached to them; there are 3 (not including explorer) which between them account for 80MB of memory. I'd ditch these and a number of others if I was doing CPU/RAM-intensive work and save over 100MB of RAM.
I'd also work with sound/video files on a physically separate hard drive (not just a partition on the C drive) dedicated for that purpose. This will save a lot of thrashing around on the C drive and should speed things up appreciably - provided that drive is a separate internal drive and not a USB external drive (they tend to be slower and are really most useful for archiving).
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by lazyhound
Re: Windows Media Player
Oh, and having said all that, I never use WTM. I prefer the alternatives.
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by lazyhound
Re: Windows Media Player
What is the linux equivalent of Windows Media Player?
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by pbassnote
Re: Windows Media Player
Oops! when I said I never use WTM I meant of course WMP (Windows Media Player).
# Posted on July 24th 2006 by lazyhound