Okay, we might as well start putting together all the tweaks and optimizations for PT 5.3 on WinXP. These are in addition to the standard tips provided by Digidesign, which I won't list here. So here goes: 1. (For users who do a lot of Mac-PC cross platform session work)Use NTFS file system--while defragging is slower than FAT32 and no backward compatibility with Win98, Me, etc. and there is no performance benefit to NTFS with respect to audio, one nice benefit of NTFS is that NTFS can read the "resource fork" of SDII files from MacOS and therefore recognize and retain the timecode stamps used in these files. FAT32 can't do this. 2. (tip #2 has been discovered to be ill-advised and has been removed--please skip to #3) 3. Download and install the latest Microsoft XP patches and updates. 4. Disable Windows Messenger (big resource hog) by right clicking its icon in the taskbar tray, select open, go to Tools menu, select Options/Preferences and uncheck "Run this program when Windows starts" 5. Eliminate any desktop background or wallpaper, which require Active Desktop to be activated, which use more resources. Right click on the desktop, select Properties, Desktop tab, and select (None) in the Background field to remove the background. Next disable visual effects by selecting the Appearance tab, click the Effects button and disable "Use transition effects" and "Show window contents while dragging". Next select the Settings tab and set your display color quality to 16 bit. Higher bit depths detract from audio performance since Windows needs to allocate more resources to screen redraws. Next select the Screen Saver tab and select None. On the same page, select monitor power saving options and deactivate hibernate mode (set to Never). Also deactivate automatic power down mode for hard disks. 6. Turn off system restore by going into the Control Panel > System > system restore tab, then check "turn off system restore on all drives". If you do this tweak make sure you regularly do manual backups of your files and data, as XP will no longer automatically do any. Still under Control Panel/System, select the Advanced tab. Click Performance settings button and select the Visual Effects tab. Choose "adjust for best performance" and then select the Advanced tab. Under Processor Settings, select "adjust for best performance of background services". 7. Disable fast user switching by going into the Control Panel > User Accounts, click on "Change the way users log on and off" and uncheck "fast user switching". 8. Disable any unneeded system services, being careful not to disable any needed services by XP. Go to for a good step by step. 9. Disable disk I/O performance logging, which will free up some resources. Go to the Start menu, select Run and type "diskperf -n" (without the quotes) and click OK. 10. Disable write-behind caching, which will increase performance by writing data immediately to disk. Go to Control Panel > System, select Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button. Click the "plus" sign next to Disk Drives and select a drive. Choose properties and uncheck "Write Cache Enabled". Repeat for all drives.

Wow! thanks for all of the tips and a im sure the rest of the DUC feels the same way. If i find any other tips i will be sure to post them, Cheers.

Hey Zach, You're a good man...sincerely, thanks very much for this! ~Roy

No problem Anyone feel free to augment the list with anything else I've missed.

thanks a lot...this will help tremendously. A couple of things that I have read and now confirmed. If you do keep fast switching available note that XP does not like more than 2 user profiles. It is a known bug that has yet to be corrected. Also I tried the fast switch last night and when I went back to the 3rd profile on startup it FROZE. XP never freezes so I think it's that third profile raising havoc. Good thing is I can now run other things without PTLE taking a crap on me. Even with all the stuff running in the background right now, I can still get at least my more cpu intensive songs (borderline redline) to run in XP. Very cool.

Whew, I'm out of breath just from scrolling....sheesh!...