Essential Toolkit for Windows - Part 1:
10 Non-Music Tools You'll Want for Music
DPC Latency Checker
www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml
Click to enlarge
Process Explorer does a good job of showing resource consumption, which is important to audio (and many other tasks). It doesn't necessarily make it easy to tell whether driver resource consumption will interfere with real-time audio operation, though. For that, turn to DPC Latency Checker. It shows if a kernel-mode device driver on your machine is misbehaving in a way that will cause audio drop-outs. The bad news is, it won't tell you which driver is the problem, which means you should run it when you first get a system and after you install each new driver to save yourself headaches later. (Process Explorer also shows Deferred Procedure Calls, but DPC Latency Checker shows how they impact latency. The two tools complement one another nicely as a result.)
Pictured above, you can see what happens when DPC problems go horribly wrong. (Before this starts fueling platform war arguments, kernel-level drivers can cause problems on any OS; this just makes them easier to see and diagnose.)
Folders
No, there's no download here. The easiest way I've found to manage Windows VSTs for testing purposes is just to maintain separate VST folders. A badly-behaved VST can cause any host to become unexpectedly unstable, so it's essential to maintain, at the very least, a "known safe" default VST folder for critical uses and then an "experimental" folder for when you want to try some bizarre plug-in you just found online In fact, it's even possible to point different hosts at different folders -- so Kore, FL Studio, SONAR, and Ableton Live might each run with different plug-ins. This only works with VST plug-ins, but that's usually the bulk of what we wind up working with.
Revo Uninstaller, Absolute Uninstaller
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www.glarysoft.com/absolute-uninstaller
Uninstalling software is a terrific way of removing tools that cause problems. Windows' own built-in uninstaller is already a step in the right direction -- and something notably absent on Windows. But it's both slow AND incomplete. Too often, it leaves artifacts of your software on your machine, and that's a big deal since you're probably turning to an uninstaller to get rid of something you want completely gone. Revo and Absolute Uninstaller each address this issue. Absolute is the faster of the two, and even includes batch-processing tools (perfect for uninstalling crapware on a PC, if you got it from someone other than Rain). Revo seems a little smarter about finding what's been installed on your system, and while it's much slower, it's also offers selectable, obsessive control over what gets removed, in case a problem app is being stubborn about getting uninstalled. Lately, I've been using Revo most of the time. The "moderate" setting is probably your best way to go.
Comodo Firewall Pro
www.personalfirewall.comodo.com
Firewalls and malware protectors can also be big resource hogs. Find one that, at the very least, you can easily turn off when you're going onstage or doing critical studio work.
I will plug the superb Comodo Firewall Pro. It's free, it's efficient, it stays out of your way, and it's more effective at actually preventing viruses and malware by looking for threat patterns at the network/firewall stage. It's much closer to what musicians actually need, because it uses predictive logic rather than doing a lot of heavy-duty scanning. Settings can be a little unfriendly, and it will nag you when you first install it and it learns what software you use (like any firewall), but overall it's the way to go, and it's hard to believe it's free.
A badly-behaved VST can cause any host to become unexpectedly unstable, so it's essential to maintain, at the very least, a "known safe" default VST folder
Quick Startup
www.glarysoft.com/quick-startup
Quick Startup is truly brilliant. Not only does it help remove startup entries, speeding your machine startup and removing potentially resource-hogging tools, but it automatically looks to a community to rate and describe what each item is and whether you really need it. You can also use this to add items easily to startup, like MIDI-OX.
Click to enlarge
Microsoft Management Console
services.msc
Services, software that runs in the background on your PC, can be responsible for unnecessary resource consumption. There are various tools for evaluating and disabling services running on Windows, but the default Microsoft Management Console is actually my favorite. Just make sure you research what a service is before disabling it. And be realistic about expectations: many services don't ever load (you'll see an "active" column in services.msc), and only a few, misbehaved services tend to cause trouble. Start with Process Explorer to evaluate your issue, and try uninstallers and startup managers first.
By the way, my current favorite services to disable on Vista, if you've got Home Premium or Ultimate: the Windows Media Center services. If you don't use Media Center, you can save some additional resources. (The related mcupdate.exe loaded for me regularly before I did this.)
TweakUAC
User Account Control is a new feature of Vista designed to make it more secure. Much of what actually happens doesn't involve the annoying alerts you see, but under the hood. You can use TweakUAC's "Quiet mode" to disable some of these prompts while retaining the security features. (Some of those security features need to be on for some software, like Microsoft's new Live Mesh, to function.) Also, some software installers that haven't been fully updated for Vista may have problems with UAC on. You can temporarily disable UAC using TweakUAC, install the software or driver, then restore UAC. It's all free and works very nicely, though a restart is required.
Another approach, though it will actually make Vista ever so slightly less secure in specific cases,
is to disable the portion of UAC that blacks out the screen. An added reason to do that: I find the
UAC prompt causes an annoying audio glitch. Here's the method:
www.howtogeek.com
With this hack and/or Quiet Mode in TweakUAC, you get the majority of the security benefits of UAC without the muss.
Two more for the road:
They really have nothing to do with audio, but I live by them. WinSplit Revolution is a lightweight,
easy-to-use tool that assigns keyboard shortcuts to tiling and resizing windows. It's perfect for
viewing two windows side by side, making use of your wide screen, and I miss it a lot when I'm on other platforms.
ClipX is a simple but effective clipboard tool that lets you save multiple entries to your clipboard
and call them up with a keyboard shortcut. Both are free.
Copyright 2008 by Peter Kirn and licensed to Rain Recording. All rights reserved.
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