for what it is worth, i played around this evening on a sony vaio cor 2 duo 2.26ghz with vista sp1, 32bit, Itch 1.1 on usb latency 1 and all went well...
but like i said, i was only playing around...
processor occupation was +60% which i find rather to high to be good i guess...

no real life experience though

I think the serato and Numark team tired of helping people with the same problem. since they know i have a mac and ns7 working good with they would never help with vista.

Itch is unstable it need more memory on windows than mac.
Even without the ns7 connected; Itch still crash when tryin to read Crates, even when u turn off everything, no help.

So wwy it working prefect on Mac OS and then on Windows Vista it crashes on the same computer.

Maybe 2.0 will work better with windows

Hi BadBoyChubs

"The USB red light on the unit keps blinking."

The issue which you describe here is an indication that your computers USB performance is being inhibited.

This is commonly caused when computer manufacturers misconfigure internal hardware or a system has old or buggy hardware drivers.

It is not a wise idea to use bootcamp for performance use. Bootcamp is a virtualisation technology which runs windows in a Virtual and slightly slower environment.

A piece of software sits between the Mac hardware and Windows which allows the two to work together. This process slows down any action on the system, while for business use this may not be a problem for live performance it can lead to serious latency or USB dropouts. For this reason may music/performance software companies recommend that their users avoid bootcamp and use native OSX versions of their products.

Furthermore many of the drivers loaded by bootcamp are windows placeholder drivers which offer a slower performance than native drivers. As time goes on it seems component manufacturers are producing native bootcamp drivers. These may be on windows update.

There have been notable improvements in bootcamp 3 which is included with snowleopard and the driver updates which have been released as a result. However I still personally recommend not using bootcamp in a live environment.

WoW! thanks for your Help, I never knew that! This is wat u call help!

Hi BadBoyChubs.

Sbangs is bang on - Apple spend a lot of time creating a perfect unity between hardware and software, their drivers are some of the best on the market (which is why PC's with comparable hardware seem a lot slower).

I would recommend that you run on OS X with ITCH too.

I run ITCH with Vista on my Dell and have no problems, but that's because the system is designed together (while it may not be quite as cohesive as a Macbook, it's very solid) and have no problems whatsoever.

I'll just bust a myth here when people say you "can't run ITCH on Vista"... Vista as an operating system is pretty poorly designed, compared to the mature version of Windows XP, or Mac OS X. People with Vista complaints are most often fixed with a few tweaks, and the rest is usually a hardware or driver conflict.

The bottom line is that we recommend XP over Vista not because Vista doesn't run well, but because XP does run very very well :D

This usefull info. that is why people still run XP or degrade to XP because of problems

However, some laptops there may be problems downgrading to XP (lack of drivers etc), so it's best sticking with Vista for many newer laptops.

PCs eh!! ;-P

So that why u have to build ur laptop online. Or pay the extra to get a good instore spec computer

Sorry, I'm not sure I understand?

Do you mean is it a good idea to buy a good known brand laptop such as Dell, HP, or Apple? Then yes it is.

Yes i meant that

Yep - when you buy a cheap laptop, that's often what you get, a cheap machine and all the low end parts and not well researched compatability that goes along with it.
The big problem is that not many people (by this I mean almost everyone) doesn't know what to look out for, especially with PC laptops (since Macs generally run very well).

Trial and error is often the best, but that doesn't help many :-(

hi Matt,
i agree that there is a lot of (excuse me the saying) crap when it comes to pc's...
but what i'de like to know is the bandwidth needed to run the NS7, if it is pushing the limits then one would be eager to conclude that it is something to be aware of whilst designing the system...after all pc's are being used...
so is there an indication of the data flow needed to handle the NS7?
i'm trying my Dell precision M6400 in the shop tonight and although this is the high end laptop from Dell i'm quite frankly not sure if it will handle the NS7 without problems!
so i guess the NS7 is asking a whole lot of the usb subsystem...

and as a developer i start thinking on how to improve the system, and if i read that the platters are constantly pushing data out, this could be optimised, but only if the NS7 has some processor on his side who can handle the optimization off course, for example i don't see why should send data out when nothing specific is happening on the platters, but then again, i'm in no way familiar with DJ software or handling these kind of devices :), just merely expressing a simple developers point of view :)

anyway i'm hoping that my 'old' m6400 will run the NS7, and i'm testing with W7 :)
so maybe that runs a bit better than Vista.
if not i'll test with XP and see what that gives.

on a side note (i asked this elsewhere also) does a 64bit platform run better than a 32bit one? (i guess not since i presume the usb handling stays the same?)

cu
marc

Hi,

We really do not recommend using Windows 7 at this point either.

Its still in beta at this time and when it is released MS usualy comes out with a service pack two or so weeks aftwards.

Driver support for Windows 7 is also not so good. The same placeholder drivers are installed by default because not all the PC hardware manufacturers have caught up yet.

Some Vista drivers will work on Windows 7 but there have been mixed reports on forums and blogs about this.

Your safest bet is to use the OS which came with that Computer, so if it came with say Vista use that and if XP use that.

64 bit PCS can process allot more information and can support more resources

You can learn more here en.wikipedia.org

Please be advised that the NS7 64 bit driver is currently in beta so on a main GIG PC I recommend sticking with 32 for now.

Hi sbangs,
64 bit can indeed process the double amount of data at the same time slice as a 32 bit would...so it seems...
but if the applications isn't handling 64 bit then all it comes down to is a 32 bit program running in a 64 bit world and needing more cpu cycles than it would run on a 32 bit system...
so i really do not know the situation right now, but i've just installed Itch 1.1 in 64 bit W7 and it runs as *32 process so i guess that moving to 64 bit isn't helping Itch processing more data as opposed to 32 bit platforms...
or does there exist a true 64bit Itch release?

cu
marc

Hi MarcA,

Im not sure at this time if the program will be made fully 64 bit but it certainly will work on it. Serato software products are designed to be as efficient as possible.

I will ask the team for their thoughts.

Sorry, but that's totally wrong. Bootcamp is NO virtualisation like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion. In fact it's not much more than a boot loader. So a Bootcamp Windows installation runs as native as OS X on the computer.


No. All the drivers used in a Bootcamp installation are and always were normal Windows drivers. How well or badly written these drivers are is another question, of course.

Hi,

Why the necropost? this topic has been solved for a while now.

Bootcamp is a wrapper which creates a virtual environment for windows to run in. It runs native in the sense that you do not need to use software ie parallels however it still uses a virtualized abstraction layer and integrators to make Mac hardware appear as standard IBM compliant hardware. This can be slower and is not ideal for live use.

They are Windows drivers but they are written by Microsoft to offer generic support for many pieces of hardware. Its common knowledge that these drivers do not offer good multimedia performance. As time goes on more of the drivers are being released for bootcamp by Apple and their contract manufactures.

If its working for you great we just do not recommend it for best out of the box experience. The mac version if Itch works very well so there is no need to use boot-camp with the NS7 unless some one is using a bespoke configuration. Many audio applications make similar recommendations to use a native OS.