i5? F-off. It's an i7. (Sorry, a particular scene in 'The Life of Brian' sprang to mind.)

Yeah, I don't think I'm going to be able to stop myself from trying this. It's interesting looking at the Performance Monitor - few IRQs get shunted to CPU1. For example, before setting affinities, Latency Checker ran on CPU1 - now it runs on CPU0. Whatever, the sound is crystal clean now.

Mani.

Ah, OK. The latter (switching DEP off) is pretty straight forward also:

1. Make sure you're running in Administrator mode.
2. click the Windows Start button and type 'cmd' in the search field - a black command line box should appear
3. now type bcdedit.exe /set nx AlwaysOff in the command line and press enter

That's it! It worked for me on both W7 and W2008.

Mani.

Hi Gerard. Do you mean how to use the MS Interrupt-Affinity Policy Tool? If so, I'd be happy to do this when I'm back home this evening. It's pretty straight forward, and Nick's document helps a lot.

Mani.

Hi Josef. 64-bit in both cases. The rationale here is that I want to use 8GB of RAM and allocate 4GB to RAMDisk. (I have a few hires albums that take ~3.5GB with all tracks loaded.)

Mani.

Sorry to hear that boleary. As you said, take it as a learning experience.

Without meaning to rub things in, I'm close to heaven right now. I still have my W7 SSD attached and can easily switch between W7 and W2008 (essentially Vista) via the BIOS. The W7 SSD has all the tweaks applied, up to and including RAMDisk, but not the latest tweaks suggested by Nick. The W2008 SSD has pretty much everything.

I cannot believe that up until this weekend I had been putting up with such second-rate sound from the W7 SSD. What really surprises me though is the difference in clarity between W7 and W2008. The latter is much tighter and clearer, and just sounds real. I am convinced this was not the case before applying Nick's latest tweaks. I strongly advise anyone who feels Vista is giving them too much bass to try these tweaks.

Mani.

How does it sound? Well, very nice indeed! I've just had my brother over and through headphones (my AKG-1000s are the most revealing I've ever heard), he couldn't tell the difference between vinyl and a 24/192 recording played back on XX. And I'm not sure I can anymore either.

Thanks for all the effort Nick - your tweaks have been superb.

Oh and for anyone who is tempted to try this, it should be totally fine and straight forward - my earlier issues were my own doing and not the SW's. But it is quite laborious setting all the affinities...

Mani.

Sorry Boleary, can't help. I hope you get it sorted though.

For others who are thinking of doing this, Telstar's suggestion worked for me - "bcdedit.exe /set nx AlwaysOff”

Mani.

Hey Nick, thanks so mucj for this - I really appreciate it. Will try this later and let you know how it sounds.

Cheers,
Mani.

I've turned DEP off, and implemented most of the tweaks in this thread, and the SFS still has an affect on the sound! When someone can explain why this is the case, I'll be happy.

I've also been comparing Engine#3, Engine#4(Adaptive) and Engine#4(Special) to a vinyl source and... Engine#4(Adaptive) comes closest in my setup. There is a quality that vinyl has (mine at least) which I call 'sweetness' that my digital playback is getting closer to, but still isn't quite recreating. Vista (W2008) has helped, but I'm still not there. The sound of my vinyl is both totally organic and yet ultra detailed. With my digital playback I can get one or the other, but I'm finding it very difficult to get both to the same degree as the vinyl. Oh, and the DAC is totally out of the equation - I'm feeding the vinyl through the ADC/DAC for all listening. When you do this with a good ADC/DAC, you realise one thing very quickly - PCM digital itself is very, very good.

Mani.

Hey Nick,

Yeah, I'd already figured this out - I'm on scheme 3. But thanks for the reminder.

I've been viewing CPU activity during playback, and it does seem that ordinarily nothing much other than XX gets appointed to CPU1. However, programs like 'Latency Checker' seem to get appointed there also, when running.

I was wondering whether it would be worth creating 8 cores with hyperthreading and 'hogging' a whole one for XX, a whole one for the device driver, etc...

Mani.

Just loaded the software linked by tehbah. It works a treat and is very easy to setup - there's a proper installation package.

As for improved SW, well this is more difficult to figure out. I started by setting a mask just for devices that have interrupt resources (I used Device Manager and viewed by resource type). I really liked the sound.

Like Nick, I then started getting more medieval, and althought everything worked fine, I wasn't sure if the sound had changed. It's very difficult to know for sure. But, it'd be easy to set things back to default.

Will share moe thoughts when I've had more of a play.

Mani.

Thanks tehbah. Will give this one a go...

Mani.

Doh! I think I've just had a case of not reading the 'READ ME' file - didn't make the registry changes required.

Mani.

Well I've just tried it, and... even with all the warnings that Nick posted, I've had really problems with it. A couple of blue screens on start-up (had to select 'revert back to last good configuration'), and now I'm struggling to get RAMDisk to work again. It seems that as soon as I add a filter/mask to anything (e.g. mouse), it stops working.

But I'd like to persevere, get it working and try it out. Nick (or anyone), are there any 'obvious' devices/processess that I should be applying a filter to?

Mani.

Just a point of clarification on my part - I'm actually running W2008 SP1 and not Vista, though I'm not sure whether there's any difference in SQ.

Mani.