Creative Solution - Or Bad Idea?

[DennisC]

As I mentioned in my first post, I am a non-DAW user looking to DAW with SAW.

I understand the "rule of thumb" to have an audio PC be just an audio PC and that non-audio uses tend to make the audio platform less stable.

That being said, I am about to replace my work PC, which is a laptop. I thought I might kick in some extra cash and get a powerful laptop and then configure it to "Dual Boot" - Windows XP Pro for work and Windows XP Home edition (or just another Pro) for audio use. Use different Drive partitions for each. Would this be a sufficient "separation" of the virtual PCs to retain the stability factors of using separate platforms for each use? FWIW, work use is MS Office applications and Citrix.

Creative Solution or Bad Idea?

Thanks,
Dennis

[Naturally Digital]

Hi Dennis,

Yes, this is a good plan IMO. The idea would be to keep the 'audio' partition as 'clean' as possible, i.e. a minimum of apps or utilities should be installed there.

Regards,
Dave.

[canipus]

Make sure you set up separate boot partitions (where the XPs are installed) and a common system partition that bootstraps the boot partitions. In addition you need separate partitions for the the installation files relating to the two operating systems and probably a separate partition (different disk) for the streaming audio files. You can do it with less but if you do you won't have the isolation that you're looking for. Whatever you do make sure you use two boot partitons with each "Windows OS" installed in each.
A common approach is to use a 2 drive system with one drive just allocated to handling system and boot partitions. You can set up 3 primary partitions on the first drive as follows.
1. 500MB 'System' FAT16
2. 6GB 'BOOT' NTFS5 XP 1
3. 6GB 'BOOT' NTFS5 XP 2

When you do the partitioning make sure the first smaller partition is the first one you set up so that it falls within the first 2GB of the disk space.