Windows 8.1 - Studio worthy?

Deekay[AUS];1441007 said:
Well, that was a complete and utter fucking balls up. When I started the install of 8.1 it locked out my hdd. Didn't identify the partitions or anything. Long story short. Lost everything... again. On top of that I had dramas when I did a fresh install of 7, my USB ports weren't active. Cue 3 installs untill I worked out what it was. Turns out some how they got turned off in the BIOS. FML.
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Didn't keep any backups of projects/samples? :/
 
Nope, lost it all. I had it all backed up to another partition, but 8.1 took care of that. I didn't have any backups of my projects which the though had crossed my mind to burn a dvd backup. But alas didn't realise I was going to get raped in the bumhole with a cactus by the version of Windows I won't mention.

On top of that, my headphone jack has decided to put it's cue in the rack. Dunno why the fuck it has done it. But producing is put on hold untill I can get an usb soundcard.
 
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I'm currently using Windows 7, but am looking at building a new PC for production... I'm wondering how many people in the music production community are using Windows 8.1 (or above I guess too) and how the compatibility is now in regards to our DAWs and well known commonly used plug-in's & VST's?

When this post was created a few years ago I know there was a lot of people still having trouble with running Windows 8 as a audio production machine. I'm also hearing that people are running into issues with installing Windows 7 on the new generation Skylake Intel chips, and that Intel is going to stop supporting Windows 7 on the new Skylake chips in a year or two (first they said 2016, then they bumped it to somewhere in 2017 I guess).
 
I don't know. I hardly used 8 before getting the free upgrade to 10. Why would you not want to be on the latest version?
 
A lot of times the latest version has compatibility issues with software. Especially music production software, even Mack OS is susceptible to this as we've seen in the past as well.

I'm just worried that if I upgrade to 8.1 or 10, I'll run into issues with some of my VST's not working or other programs. I mean look at windows vista, it was so bad people stayed on XP until Windows 7 came out.

I guess the main reason I'm asking questions is everybody I know personally that produces on windows still uses 7. Everybody else I know uses Mac. So I haven't had personal contact with the production studio running 8.1 or 10 yet. Figured there might be a reason for that
 
Vista was an absolute clusterfuck. Windows 10 is actually pretty good. Is your Windows 7 32 or 64?
 
My 7 is 64 bit. I'm running Ableton on 32 bit in it mostly right now because I only had 4GB if RAM anyway when I got the thing. Recently pushed it up to 8GB (it's a laptop), but I'm building a new desktop with my tax return. Looking to make one with the new skylake cores. I've got Ableton 64 bit installed as well, just need to install all my plugins as 64bit for it. But if I'm gonna do all that, might as well do it in a new system since I need one bad.

I guess I might as well get Windows 10 on the new system. I might get two hard drives on it, one with 7 and one with 10, and be able to duel boot it. But if Windows 10 works fine I might as well use it. Not particularly attached to 7 for any reason other than worried 10 will have compatibly issues.
 
My old laptop died, so I had to get a new one, and that meant Windows 10.
I'm still on Cubase 6.5 (old), and using a lot of older (freeware) 32 bit VST2 plugins. No problems at all.

What however quickly became a problem was that the new laptop only had USB 3 ports, which sent both my Frontier Designs Alphatrack* and Focusrite VRM Box into Haywire. Reading up a bit, it seems that a lot of USB 2 audio hardware doesn't play nice with USB 3 ports. In my case, it resultated in the Alphatrack not working at all, and the VRM Box performing poorer than the on-board audio with Asio4All.
Might be that the problem could be mitigated by using a USB 2 hub, haven't had the time to dick around with it that much yet.

* most likely, although it could be the drivers which haven't been update since Vista, but installs and works fine on Win7
 
Thanks for the info guys, sounds like I might've been worrying over nothing. It makes sense to look forward and use the newest operating system. I'm assuming any new software that's coming out is attempting to be compatible with it as well. I might lose the use of a few old school no longer supported plug-ins, but I'm cool with that.

I never thought of any issues with USB 3 plugs, but that's something I might need to look into as well. My audio interface is pretty old and plugs into the USB port, so maybe I'll just need to look for a new one that works on USB 3. Or maybe even get one that plugs into the PCIE slot, and has a Dropbox (think that's what it's called) attachment for everything else to plug into..... But if I remember correctly most of those are ridiculously priced. I'd need to get something around 200 bucks, which probably means another USB audio interface.
 
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