"Virtual" dedicated PC

[EER]

I flipped through a couple of the postings here and came across Stone's extremely good description and reasoning why you need a "dedicated" PC for home recording. I could recognize a lot of the problems - not because I do recordings myself (yet) but because I do a lot of digital photo work using PhotoShop and Corel. I also enjoy the occasional PC Game at the same time as my home PC also serves as my business back-up machine when I work from home.

The way I solved the need for three total different environments is quiet simple - and inexpensive.

I picked-up some HD cartridges from the PC
shop - about US$ 10 a piece. Then all you do is to install the "receiving" frame in your tower and have 3 (or more) different HDs you can change between depending on what you want to do.

That allow you to set-up your PC optimally for the task (applications) you want to work on - without "interference" from other applications or drivers that eat your resources.

- Perhaps this is old news - just wanted to mention it anyway.

[Dushan]

Here is my idea. As I have only one hard disc, I partitioned it with partition magic program and instaled two OS - win98 for music and win2000 for everything else. When starting, I can choose partition - OS to boot. This way my "music computer" is always clean and stable!
Cheers!

[StoneDragon]

That swappable drives idea is a real good one. I might have to look into that.

I do a similar thing by setting up hardware profiles in the device manager.... even on my dedicated computer.

When it comes time to do some serious recording, I switch to a different profile which leaves out certain potentially conflicting hardware, like the network card and USB busses.

[EER]

There are a couple of reasons why I went for the swap drive concept.
For one, you can use the same copy of OS for all the disks - meaning that you don't need to invest more money in Mr Gates (very important
to me http://www.zentao.com/ubb/smilies/smile.gif ).
Must be legal since you use the same OS on the same computer.

Second reason is that if you crash your hard drive - it only affects one "environment". Why would I worry about disk crash?

Because sometimes it happens with "misbehaved" games, so if I used only one disk for all - I would have to rebuild my "photo" computer and "business" computer. You only need to do that one time before you realize that there are better things to spend your time on than to wait for Windows to boot between every application you have reinstalled.

Well - just my 2c