Optimising Vista laptop for Ableton Live! :Part 1 – Speeding up Vista

Overview:

I’m running Ableton 7.01 on my main PC, (Pentium Duo 3.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 1.75TB Disks, 250 SATA II specifically for Ableton, Built in (crap)  Soundcard, Win Xp SP3), it runs pretty well.  I haven’t (yet) sprung for a decent set of Active nearfield monitors so I’m using a fairly bog standard set of 5.1 computer speakers with subwoofer. Obviously that not ideal but as long as you are aware of their limitations, you can still do a fairly decent mixdown.

I’m looking to do some live sets with a DJ friend and with a view to that, I bought a Laptop. Cash was limited but for $1000 (AUD) I picked up a Toshiba Satellite A200 (Pentium Duo 2GHz, 2GB RAM, Vista Home Premium SP1, 150GB built in Disk, on board Sound card).

Optimising Vista laptop for Ableton Live

Bear in mind, I’m writing this as I’m doing it, the order in which I do things may be less than efficient …

I’ll try and come back and re-order it later (if I’m not too busy playing with Ableton)

Part 1 is basically just about speeding up Vista, if you’ve already got Vista running quickly then move on to Part 2: Optimising Ableton Live! on Vista Laptop (link will work when it’s written).

1. Hard Disk

As I’m stuck with the internal for the moment, I enabled “Write Caching” and “Advanced Performance”.

can be found if you right click your hard disk in Explorer, choose “properties”, select “Hardware” tab, highlight the disk, click “properties” button, choose “Policies” tab and tick the boxes.

2. New profile

Setting up a profile to be used solely for music seems an obvious start, I won’t be sending emails/ editing photos / writing blogs mid set (unless no-one turns up) – so there’s a lot of programs which can be removed from this new profile and services I can stop.

How to create a new Vista Account / profile…

Start Menu > Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage Accounts > “create a new account” link

Enter the name (“Ableton” in my case) and give it Administrator rights (you need Administrator access to be able to change running services etc)

Click “Start Menu” choose “Shut Down” then choose “Switch User” Open your “Ableton” account and enter password if you put one in.

Be prepared to swear when you realise that Vista has started with Aero, Sidebar and all that other crap you disabled when you first turned it on! (at least I can give you instructions on how to disable it all now).

3. Disable all unnecessary, resource hogging, services, applications, animations in Vista.

Any external links will open in a new window

Disable Windows Sidebar

Disable Aero in Vista (I chose Windows Standard)

Change Start Menu -Right click Start Menu button and choose “properties”, select “Classic start menu” (I disabled the two “recently opened options too), click “Customize” and set your menu up as you’d like.

Disable Vista Wallpaper – right click on desktop, choose “personalise”, click desktop background, choose “solid colours” from the drop down box – pick your favourite colour (desktop wallpapers only take up a small amount of memory, but if you don’t need it don’t use it).

Remove optional and (maybe) unnecessary components

Disable Windows Sounds – Right click on the Desktop, choose “Personalise”, click “Sounds”, choose “no sounds” in drop down box.

Turn of UAC (User Account Control)

Speed up Vista with ReadyBoost I can’t confirm if this has made much of a difference, but if you have a spare memory card / USB drive then it can hurt. (Don’t go out and buy one on my say so though).

Stop an Application from Running at Startup in Windows Vista – Easy way to stop unnecessary programs like anti-virus, bluetooth manager etc starting up on your music profile.

Speeding up Vista Summary

OK, after restarting in your “Ableton” profile, your vista laptop should be running as quickly as it can with minimal services running.

The next part of this post will (hopefully) help you optimising Ableton Live! 7.01 to run on your Vista laptop.

I’m hoping that some of you out there can add to this post. I’m not super experienced with Vista, so any extra advice / ideas – please let me know. The ones that work well will be edited into the post (with credit if I remember).

If you’re lucky enough to have friends like mine, you will just have had a large plate of freshly baked warm scones with Jam and Whipped Cream put in front of you – so sit back and enjoy!