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Boot up configuration managers?

I do some electronic music that tends to work best when Windows is optimized. I typically disable the network card, and various other drivers that are loaded when Windows is running normally. I've considered installing a "clean" Windows 7 on another partition and using something like the Windows boot partition manager. I am posting this question to see if there is anything available software-wise that would allow me to create custom "boot ups" like in the old book disk days.

Does anyone know of such software or easiest ways to achieve this?

SOLUTION

David Johnson, CD

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

nobus

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BillDL

By far your best option is to have an entirely separate computer that is dedicated to your music recording and production, and you can keep it in the optimised state with all software updates disabled, and unnecessary services and startups disabled, and disconnected from the Internet. You don't really want the Indexing Service or Windows update kicking in while you are recording.

I still use a Windows XP PC with a good ASIO-compliant soundcard and reasonable graphics card for digital recording. I have used a few such PCs for tis purpose, but with each one I always went a step further with the optimisation using http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html. The downside of these older XP computers is that the processor speeds is now at the lower end of what is needed to handle some quite intensive workloads, and the motherboards don't allow more than 4GB of RAM to be installed. if I upgraded to newer usb audio interface I probably wouldn't be able to find software or drivers that work on XP, so I would then need to use one of my Win7 computers. In the meantime my last remaining Windows XP computer is still perfectly usable, but is nearing the end of its useful life as a recording PC. I would have used small footprint Linux versions for this purpose in the past, but finding drivers for audio interface hardware is difficult.

Your next best option is to install and optimise Windows 7 on a separate partition of your hard drive or on a second hard drive and just boot to that for recording purposes.

greddin

ASKER

Can you guys remind me of how the default Windows boot manager works? if I added another hard drive and/or partition and installed Windows 7 to it, does Windows automatically add this "new" install to the boot manager as a choice selection?

Thanks

nobus

yes