Speed Up Your Music Production Part 2
This is the second part in my guide to making a dual boot sytem with Windows XP and Windows XP. If you would like to read Part 1 go here Speed Up Your Music Production Part 1.
What you will need
1. If you want to make a dual boot system, the first thing I can recommend is going out and buying a new hard drive with the intention to use the new hard drive just for music production. (Or if you have a spare drive already in your system then create a new partition at the beginning of the drive using Partition Magic.)
2. You will also need another copy of Window XP which shouldn’t be too hard to find these days as everyone is upgrading to Vista.
How to partition your drive
1. The first thing you should do is install your new HDD. Start up your PC into your existing version of Windows XP and install your new Windows XP disk. Choose to install Windows XP and make sure that the destination disk is your new hard drive.
2. Set up your partitions in the Windows XP install. You will gain benefits making partitions smaller than 25% of the disks total capacity. Make the first partition at the very beginning of the disk 10gb. This 10gb partition should be enough to fit Windows XP, your music sequencer and various VST’s.
3.The outer regions of a hard disk are the fastest. When the hard disk drive spins it needs less rotations to read/write for the same amount of data, when compared with the inner regions of the disk. As a result we do not want to use all of this space up just for Windows XP.
4. The next partition on the disk should be reserved for your audio projects. Make this as big or small as you like depending on how large your songs may become. (Remember you can always move older projects out of this partition if it becomes too full).
5. All of the left over space is used for sample storage and whatever else you like. So that’s it really, just create two partitions, the first for system data and the second one for audio projects.
Install your second copy of Windows XP
1. Install Windows XP onto the partition named system. Your computer may reboot during the installation several times. Once the final steps of the installation have been completed, your computer will boot into you new copy of Windows XP.
2. Use the new copy of windows for music production only, and use your other copy for everything else. The freed up processor power can now be used for layering more samples and adding more effects to your tunes. It is really amazing how much different this has made to my system. Some of my tunes that came close to maxing out my PC on the old install of Windows XP do not even come close to maxing out on the fresh install of Windows XP.
3. The next time you turn on your computer you will be prompted as to which version of Windows XP you would like to load. Just select the appropriate version and that’s the one that will be loaded. Have fun with this!
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