OK, I bit
 

Greets, gang--

my old/slow XP pro box finally went to Valhalla (after serving well from Vegas 3-7), and as a near-term replacement i went with a Vista box. I've (using V8 pro) killed as many Vista features as possible, getting it as close as possible to bare bones OS for editing. No real problems so far, though a mix of capture to external drive ops have given me a couple of BSOD's, locked up VidCap etc. Other than these it's seeming solid so far (well... as far as it can seem 'solid' compared to the near-faultless XP box).

Question: for years i've kept a list of 'leave-on processes' for XP, that give one a roster of what background procs can be killed for performance/reliability increase. Not surprisingly, Vista has a bunch more procs going on.

Is there a current editing-specific (and V8P specific, specifically) leave-on procs list for Vista? I've been snooping here and have not found any. There look like a bunch of antsy procs going in Vista-- what can i nix?

Thanks, group

MRP

In my own tests, you'll get a 1% improvement from turning background services off. It's not worthwhile.

The exceptions:
Anti-virus
Distributed computing apps (folding, SETI, prime95, etc.)

My personal experience with Vegas 8 is that is it as reliable on Vista as on XP. Indeed, I really haven't had any stability/incompatibility/speed issues with anything on Vista in the 15 months I've been using it. I run it pretty much in its out-of-the-box configuration particularly where services and things are concerned. My anti-virus (the infamous Norton Internet Security) runs, too. When I need to be sure it won't start a system scan, I just disable that part. I have happily captured from three DV devices at the same time while surfing, graphics editing, email etc without any problems.

What other applications do you have installed - especially old ones - or hardware - again especially old stuff?

Are your external drives USB or FireWire? In my experience of reading other people's problems on other forums, bad USB drivers and/or bad USB implementation in the device itself is to blame.

What is your computer's configuration?

VP8 Vista user here, and as long as you have Glass tuned off you should be doing alright ( the more memory you can leave open for Vegas the better ), plus glass causes some sort of problem with the eyedropper tool.

Dave

thanks for the feedback and leads, men. I've sorted out one of the problems already with capture: i had failed to assign 'Never' to the various power schemes for harddisc halt, sleep, hibernation etc. THus at the 10 min mark of one of my captures, the computer dutifully went to sleep per default power scheme, cancelling the cap and crashing the external.

All my externals are FW, a few are both FW and USB, a few are FW only. I only use the USB ports when connecting to campus equipment that has no FW connex.

The 'old hardware point' is one i'll follow up on: i had just added an extra FW card from the old PC to the new Vista box-- i'd expect XP-era PCI cards to be fine w/ Vista, but i'll hit newegg to look at some specs. Might need some updated drives too on some of this stuff.

It feels like Vista is going to be good. Things improved markedly today when i discovered how to turn off that 'user account protection' deal that gives you 2 walls of "are you sure?" dialogues upon every command.

Thanks again, folks.

MRP