I actually didn't know it, but Windows Task Schedular controls a lot of things at preset times, many of which you wouldn't want. Below is one example I also didn't know it was happening : auto-defrag.

The first screen shows you how to get there, and the second screen shows the Status of Defrag which I shut off ("Uitgeschakeld"). Mind you, my 4 TB of disks will take a huge amount of time when they are defragged, and the shown trigger (which I did not create) may nice and easy go off each Wednesday at 1pm, but you can bet that when I want to play music somewhere in the afternoon, the bugger is still running.
Besides that defrag has always looked dangerous to me, and I'd really want it to run that one time I need it (which is completely never because I take care of the music data not being fragmented).


Note : I didn't do much further with the many many tasks which are in there, because most of them wouldn't harm me (they run a short time only, or just are performed once per year , etc.).

SuperFetch : Another stupid so called intelligent thing, that tries to pre-load and prepare for files to load a next time faster. One of the most I/O incurring services.

ReadyBoost : Honestly I shut this down because many people report problems with this one (and otherwise I forgot). I didn't notice any slowing down of file copying or whatever, after shutting this one down.

A special remark about Windows Search :
This one too can scan your whole disk but for other reasons than "indexing". It is related to being friendly to you;
Look at the Start Button (as you still have it). There's no room to "Run" like with XP, but typing e.g. RegEdit it will show you a link to RegEdit.exe for you to click (and run). Now, *this* will not work anymore !!
You really must shut down this service, but be prepared a bit for this now lacking help feature !

Below is a row of Services you really don't need, and which I shut down for a maybe strange reason : Vista will shut them down anyway (at least that can happen) during playback with XXHighEnd. So I thought they can be in the way ...


Set the Start Type (4th column) to the value I show, and where "handmatig" means "manual".

Note : The first one (03), about the Tablet PC should be left as it is when you actually use a tablet PC under Vista.

Careful : You can see for yourself that the others may not be nice for you to shut down. I did it anyway, because (e.g.) I don't print from the audio PC, I don't capture images from a camera, and I sure don't want Defender to scan along. Note with this latter : looking at Defender01 you must know that at each boot that window appears (Edit : don't apply this, better look here : Shutting off Windows Defender). It tells you that the (Defender) Service has stopped, which is really no problem. It may be my fault that I don't know how that get away with this more formally, so that window keeps on appearing.

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Edit :
I realized that my way of shutting off Defender isn't a nice one. Better do this :

Find Defender and start it (you can use Windows Help and search for Defender). See the screenshot at the very bottom in this post. Choose the option where the arrow is, then choose "Options", and in there untick *all* the leftmost checkboxes.
IMPORTANT : When you already shut down the Service for Windows Defender, you must restart it manually first (go to Services, find Windows Defender, rightclick - Start). Now Defender can be started to give entry to the options just described.
Leave the service shut off anyway (see more above), or reboot to shut it off when you just had to start it in order to change the Defender settings.

Now the message as shown in Defender01 (below) doesn't show anymore at booting.

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Also look at the last one. This says "start delayed", or IOW start when you ask for it. You might need that at times, and in normal situations ot won't run now.

The poor thing can only guess wrong here, but does it anyway.

Set the value as shown to 0.
Btw, if it is active it will be set to 3. You might have shut this off already by other means.

Look at the bottom for the full key to this entry.

Bootoptimizer may ****
The only thing what is does, is rather constantly "fetching" things you might incur for changes during a next boot (which you almost never do), while it slows down your system for that all the time. And you know what ? after applying all of the other things booting is twice as fast the least.

Apply the change to the Registry as you see below. Thus, enter N for Enable.

This is for 0% related to shutting off Indexing at some higher level. That only works a bit, but sure not for all, and 100% sure not for ever.
So, you MUST shut off indexing per disk you have, and (!!) when the disk gets unmounted, you must do this *explicitly* again.

What you see below looks like the obvious, but there's something you might not know, and it is really necessay to do it right :

The second screen asks you where to apply the shut off of the indexing, and this *must* be applied to all the subfolders and files as well.
Once you receive a disk, or re-mount it, you cannot be sure what the settings are for the subfolders etc., so in order to be sure you *must* switch ON indexing, press apply, let the second screen come up, choose the first option to be fast, and then pull up the screen again for shutting Indexing OFF, Apply, and choose the SECOND option in the second screen.

Only now, the ever and ever scanning of all the files stay away.
And for those reading this who are less familiar with what happens with our music data, and galeries and all ... personally my number of files is MILLIONS (6 draws to Galeries is enough for that).

Hi all,

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Edit : All of the below works for W7 just the same and you can safely perform the .bat file which is in this post from this topic : http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=548.msg4331#msg4331 (courtesy of andy74 -> thanks !). You may get a message that a service can't be stopped because it is not running, which is no problem.
Also notice that the shutting off the log files (which remains as a manual task as denoted by the output of the .bat file) is not needed again after an upgrade from Vista because those settings are retained during the upgrade.

Edit2 : This all does NOT apply for W7 SP1 (Release Candidate); it is just not necessary;
W7 SP1 shows a few I/Os only (per 1 - 2 minutes), and although the appliances in this topic were not tried for that, it is assumed they won't go away from it. At this moment (Jan 2011) no other attempts to remove those few I/O's were made either.

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First of all, for your possible interest, I will give you a little background on what I (at last) did;

For 19 months now, my audio PC lays on the floor kind of in the middle of the room, and while it should have been stored in the basement, it lays there with the disk light shining in my eyes all so often. I thought "one day I will manage" and the PC stays there as long as I did not. You could say it took 19 months.
Well, because I am always looking at that light, I kind of learned what happened when, what shouldn't and what should, and a small month ago I sat down for it, and after some first rough attempts after installing SP1 which didn't help a thing, and some other attempts that caused my system not to boot anymore, I re-installed SP0 and took a kind of other approach ...

First there is a side note, which may be important to you :

After a few months after having Vista (beginning 2007) I got my machine in the "mode" that caused all folder/file renames, deletes, moves etc. to take 30 seconds. Since half of the world is bugged by this, some of you may have this "feature" too. It is about the popup that shows you the calculation on how long the operation concerned will take, and it just *always* sits there for 30 seconds.
Millions of posts float over the Internet about this, and really nobody can solve it once it's there, and btw, 99.99% of people think this is about the slow operation itself. It is not, and it is only that popup staying there for ages, the Rename etc. actually performed immediately. However, it prevents you from a next operation most of the time, so it is really really annoying.
50% of people could get rid of it by installing SP1, which didn't help with me.
Because I tweaked things to the wrong as described briefly above, I had to reinstall Vista, and I reinstalled SP0. I did that because SP1 felt worse for some things. I just didn't like it much.

The re-install brought back the normal fast Renames and all, but strangely enough I didn't find the same Vista/SP0 as the one that appeared on my machine beginning of 2007. It was faster, the looks were different (like aero now being active without me telling it), it felt all very different, and more importantly, it sounded *completely* different (better !). And I installed exactly the same on the exact same machine. One diference : Before I installed it as a Dual Boot next to an existing XP, and this time I installed it as a Dual Boot next to the old Vista which didn't want to boot anymore. Does that cause it ? maybe.
Btw, since then I am looking veery closely at the fast Renames, and whatever I change for installing software etc. I look if the Renames still work fast. If not, I will know what caused it.

Why is the above important for this topic ? I don't know. But it could be, because I'm fairly sure if I had applied this to my old Vista install, it hadn't be enough. So the base is more right now. More lean.

The other approach

What I had been trying here and there throughout the 19 months, was something everybody does : shutting down services and see whether that helps somewhere. It lead to nothing, because in fact you are doing this in the blind. Afterwards I can guarantee this, because so many many things are needed, and all togther they create disk I/O in amounts that one really doesn't know where to start.

What I did is taking the Source Control program which can be started from within TaskManager, look at the Disk I/O screen and the programs causing the Disk I/O in the lower part of the screen, and piece by piece investigate what these programs are and how the IO they generate can be eliminated. This all together took me one day, and I can tell you, this is not about shutting down services as such ! You will see this in the outlays mote below.

What is left for I/O can be seen below;
The first screenshot is the one to achieve : nothing. But careful : this should be nothing during the time *you* don't incur for anything (like in playing a 60 minute track it should stay empty in there for 60 minutes). Did I achieve that ? nope. I can't get further than the second screenshot below, which is always about those things, and they occur at (as it seems) random intervals. The longest that it was completely quiet I think was 14 minutes, but it also can be 1 (rare) or 5 (often) or 8 (often) or 14 (often). However, these are very tiny I/Os I can't even see on the disk light. Compared to the zillions we are used too ... Walhalla.

Btw, the main reason I gave up on this one day of finding out how to stop those last few, is that they are *all* related to or anti-virus programs (which I don't have), or viruses themselves (which I think I don't have hehe), and each search for these in Google gives an infinit amount of hits. And then I had better things to do.
But go ahead with it if you like.


The things you see below are not "stupid" copies of advises of anyone else. They were all determined by me, and they *all* contribute to less I/O. Remember, I grabbed one line hence file the I/O takes place on, I looked and measured its reocccurance, and tweaked until it stayed away. Also there's the other group of knowing what will happen because of what (you do yourself).
Oh, it is also nice to know that the way I did this, makes a necessary IO much more lean. Thus, a necessary access to a file (like a WAV) could incur for, say, 20 other activities, while now this is only a few.

and not one single IO was shown during this typing ...

Here goes :

That's allright. I sent you a PM.
Peter

That is correct.

For the program, the 24, 20 and 18 bit settings are the same. This is more for yourselves and to understand what you are setting (because 18 and 20 bits DACs exist).

I myself have tweaked Vista to (be) dead. I am using those tweaks for a month now without problem.
I saved (screen copies) all the settings I changed for you out there. But I still must post them. Superfetch indeed is one of them.

Yes, it will. But since you're comfortable at Q1 = -4 and for that matter probably didn't reach your limit, you might try the Volume slider at -6dB. There's some indirect trick working in there as well ...
(don't go further than -24dB when your DAC plays with 16 bits)

The 1ms may vary, and it is not about sending a more accurate signal (I don't think that would be possible). The way I do it influences the DAC though, and it is the DAC that can be more accurate or less.


Hahaha, no, not one that I can think of. It is true though, and it is the exact reason the Invert checkbox was created in the first place. It *is* part of the process though, and where you can imagine that there's a scale of being in phase and out of phase - which really is about time alignment - you can imagine that there is one best setting. There's one thing I can tell you : an amount of jitter doesn't behave the same in the high frequencies as it does in the low frequencies (generally, when you have it right for the high frequencies it will be wrong for the low frequencies).
Also, because all is software-incurred , while the base for this all can be better and worse, in the earlier versions of XXHighEnd with the Q1 slider, that slider had much more influence on the sound than it has today. The principle of Q1 didn't change, but the software in the base did ...

I hope you're not an engineer, because then you wouldn't believe your own ears ...

I tried to explain this here :


You could say that the Q1 slider towards the lower levels, brings XX closer to the DAC. It influences the DAC more, which is not necessarily better, but in general (I mean for most people) yes, it is better.
It is not said at all that one is able to play at -4 because this highly depends on the latency of the system, but also on the playing software itself (if you followed the development of XX you've seen that at certain versions suddenly people couldn't play at e.g. -1 anymore and had to use a higher number).
Concluded, it is not strange at all when one can't reach -4 because things get distorted, BUT you could say that if your system can't reach -4 your system isn't optimal (and mind "system", which is a very wide phenomenon). The same counts for the upper level of Q1; it is not said that you can play without distortion at the topmost levels, which depends on many things but mainly the DAC itself.

The Q1 is a very fragile thing, and with some experience you can hear that at the lower levels - when too low - violins start to sound digital. This is no distortion yet, but a too high influence on the DAC and you could say it gets nerveous. Now, at interpreting these things one must be very very careful not to draw the wrong conclusions, because the too digital violin IMO is just the better representation of something which is digital from the beginning (the WAV file). You can hear this by sensing that all receives better detail at the lower Q1 levels, and you could say that as long as it is not about violins, it is just for the better. Mind you, this all is so fragile that I certainly wouldn't bother to slide up the Q1 when a violin comes by, but I'd know that violin can sound a bit better. On another note, I already play the Q1 somewhat higher lately (4) which has a reason of course (and I can play -4 without any problem).

Interesting for you might be the fact that the Q1 values of -2 and -3 are a kind of special to the sense of that those values don't workout in a consistent way. Hard to explain, but thinking in terms of the time something takes (is ordered to take) this time varies at those Q1 settings. More at -3 than at -2. But, since there's an averaging aspect in there (think in terms of how long something takes on average) the effect will be that those -2 and -3 values incur for even more stress than -4 (-4 is a consistent working value again). Thus, when your system coincidentally is in the critical range, it might happen (theoretically that is) that -2 and -3 can't play without distortion, but -4 can.

Lastly remember, in general we can say that the latency used is 1ms, and if something holds up for longer than that, you can't play (without distortion). For that matter, the 100ms as the minimum from Foobar could be interpreted as 100 times more headroom for other tasks in the system.
Btw, before you ask, the 1ms XX uses, has a purpose.

Ah, good ! so the (for me) most strange thing has been solved.


I don't know what you mean ... With the AA checkbox unticked, XX can't create clipping. The music data may already clip from itself of course (this happens in more "recordings" than you like).
If you think there is a problem somewhere in this area, please start a new topic for it, ok ?

Double is just changing the sampling rate (to double the source value) without touching the data.
Upsampling is also changing the sampling rate (double or quattro), but now the additional samples are calculated; without upsampling the additional samples are repeats from the previous.
AA = Anti Alias is a more official way of upsampling but which changes the data all over to filter out aliases which always emerge because of upsampling (because Nyquist gets disobayed then).

Thus, first you tell what the sample rate must be (double or quattro the source) and then you tell how to output that (upsampled or not, and if yes with or without AA filter).

That is exactly what XX is doing by that settings. Earlier I checked whether those 16 bits are really 16 bits (and not more by accident), but it is OK. This is why it is so strange that it doesn't work for you (combined with that it works in Foobar of course -> Foobar does those things correct as well; I checked).

And thanks for your nice words. We'll keep in touch.
Peter