Yes I agree with what you are saying as well. It would be useful if people made a note of problematic services here so others can see if they apply to them, and perhaps Brad can update in the book. I think we are both saying that “kill everything” is a bad approach from a reliability standpoint, but information on what constitutes useful tweaks is missing.
OS’s like Atlas were created for gamers who overclock their CPU’s and GPU’s and don’t care about the “occasional” blue screen or crash. Even an occasional crash during a live show is a no go for most of us. The answer lies somewhere in between Atlas and “do nothing”. Probably a lot closer to do nothing than the other extreme.
Indeed, when I saw the AtlasOS website and read ‘for gamers’, a bell rang.
A lot of people think that gaming PCs are the ultimate in performance. But we care about other things that gamers don’t even know what they are.
I also strongly believe in NUC’s instead of laptops for music rigs. We usually don’t have a shortage of power on stage, so a “desktop” can be better than a laptop. You can even use a tablet to remote into it. Much lighter and easier to place on stage compared to a laptop.
I use 2in1 Convertibles; this way I have my lead sheets and notes always in front of me (and touch sensitivity when needed). No single fail in about 8 years.
I used a SFF, small form factor, PC for years but would often have power issues with outdoor/ generator gigs. I started using a battery backup but that increased the weight and size of rig. I switched to laptops about 9 years ago when they became powerful/cheap enough to run real time audio. I’m assuming that I must be in the minority experiencing brown outs?
Cheers - David
Each of the choices has pros and cons. Everyone chooses the option that suits them best. There is no universal solution.
It is an silly answer, but there it is.
Oops. Deleted my post by accident trying to reply to it. Here it is:
Glad to finally be able to add to this thread. I’ve been thinking about installing a light-weight os on an old laptop to keep on hand as a back-up. I recently installed ReviOS on my old laptop (i5 4200u dual core with 12 GB of ram) that back in the day was struggling to handle my bass and voice as well as a midi controller for basic synths in Cantabile 3.
My new set-up involves 14 ins and minimum 4 outs doing live sound for my 10-piece band. I loaded the project on the old laptop running ReviOS in Cantabile 4 and it almost worked out of the box. After swapping out some plugins for lighter-weight equivalents I’ve got it humming at a comfortable if not perfect buffer of 256 samples.
The current rig is a gaming laptop running an i5-9300H with 16 gigs of ram. I’ve been using IK T-racks british channel on each channel for basic mixing, which I’m swapping out for the Kilohearts Snap Heap and required snapins.
Current tests have been performed using the recording of our last performance to get the mix balanced and test the functionality across all channels, as well as just me testing a handful of microphones at the same time on myself. I plan on bringing it to our next rehearsal for a real world test the first chance I get. I’ll report back when I do, but for a system that would gurgle processing only my voice and bass this is certainly a positive result.
End quote.
Reporting now after finishing my first rehearsal with the dual core i5 laptop, 7 instead of the maximum 10 musicians but good enough to get a sense of the potential of the computer in this configuration. The computer ran flawlessly for the 3-hour rehearsal at a single-buffer setting of 256. 10 Live audio inputs were used between the 7 musicians, each running through a channel strip (Waves AudioTrack), bussed to a rack comprising the Kilohearts limiter and Dragonfly plate reverb (we are using an FM transmitter and pocket radios for monitoring, the reverb helps give a bit of life to the otherwise dry headphone mix).
I could not be happier. Reading the comments I am now wondering how much of an improvement the Revi OS is compared to a straight fresh install and manual optimization, but this old laptop has found a new purpose at least as a backup should anything go wrong with my main laptop. Peace of mind.