Should I upgrade to Win10 from Win7?

Please forgive me if this is answered elsewhere on this forum. I did numerous searches and didn’t come up with anything except that my search terms were too general.

I currently am running win7 and cubase 8.5
My system is an i7 2400ghz with 8gb ram
It was built as a win7 machine.

Should I give in to MS’s prompts to upgrade to win10? Is there a benefit to music production in Cubase 8.5 inside of win10? is it a painless upgrade?

Even if you can point me to threads that answer this questions, I would be grateful. Thanks so so much! :slight_smile:

There’s this topic:

I personally keep my DAW at 7, simply because everything works the way I want it to so why take any risks.
I did upgrade my other desktop from 7 to 10. The upgrade was painless and 10 works well. Some things I prefer the way they were in 7, but other features are quite neat.

I was wondering about it too…
When i have my new pc i want o upgrade to windows 10…
Never tried windows 10… heard some positve & negative feedback
4 me Windows 8 was a nightmare did’nt like the whole touchscreen based design…
Dunno how long windows wil support win7?

Strophold, My instincts are the same. Things are working on win7 so I shouldn’t change. I just didn’t know if there might be some DAW/Cubase benefit to moving to win10. Thanks for the feedback

Maybe some handy info about windows…
next 5 comming years windows 7 is supported.

Win10, the automatic updates are not cool, and you can’t switch 'm off.
And the privacy, i’m read a-lot negative stories about it…

I thinking also about to wait… i did that with w95 w98 xp win7
There’s still 5 years left to decide about an upgrade :laughing:

Not if you want it for free!

Well, I’ve given it a try. Did the upgrade beginning of this month, and now I’m thinking I’d better go back. I did turn off all the privacy stuff, notifications, all the mobile stuff, and a number of services I didn’t think I needed, and got Win 10 to look a lot like Win 7. And generally I like Windows 10.

But, there’s something with Cubase and Windows 10, and I guess Kontakt, that I can’t seem to fix, which is audio dropouts and crackles. I can’t figure out what’s causing them. I’ve been updating drivers, looking at performance monitors, and scouring the web for clues. It was generally fine under Win 7. Best I can figure is that although my CPU is quite powerful enough, the whole system is about 5 years old, so there’s something there that Win 10 assumes is good enough for average usage, but not Cubase. Even if I freeze all the virtual instruments and set the buffer size to 512, I still get occasional dropouts on playback. I even sometimes get dropouts just playing Windows Media, maybe because my “soundcard” is an MR816CSX (and I did install the upgraded driver). You don’t see a problem on the ASIO monitor, although a red bar shows up randomly.

So who knows, could be the MR816CSX, could be Kontakt, could be the fact that memory is so much faster now than when I bought mine, just can’t figure it out. So I’ll give it another day, and then I’ll roll back to the system that was stable. In the end, I don’t think it’s a great loss, since my machine is already five years old, and if it continues to function for another five years, I’ll be quite surprised.

At any rate, you can try Win 10 out for a month, and you may find that in your situation it’s fine.

Did you also install the (legacy) firewire system driver? That is not included in the Windows 8 or 10 builds and must be downloaded separately from Microsoft. It was built into Windows 7. The only stable 1394 driver for the MR816, IMHO. It fixed the problems I was having in W 10. The link below says its for Windows 8, but it also works in Windows 10.

BTW, video card drivers play a big role in this, too.

Thank you, rtorstrick, I do hope you’re on to something. But I’m not sure if I understand. I installed the new driver from Steinberg for the MR816CSX before I did the upgrade, but you’re talking about the driver for my VIA 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller, right?

With regard to video card drivers, I did do an upgrade after the conversion to get the latest supported driver from AMD for Radeon. Another old piece of equipment, but it seems to have worked well before and after that driver upgrade.

Many thanks, still hoping to keep this operating system.

Right. It’s the driver for your 1394 interface itself, NOT the MR816. The instructions on the download page explain how to get it installed correctly.

Thanks, rtorstrick, I went ahead and installed the driver, and I think, so far, that it helps on the dropouts. I’ll give it a couple more days; after all, I have to go back to Win 7 before 31 days if I choose to, or I’m stuck with it. It’s not my thread, but I’ll just say that I’m wondering, given how old my system is, why I should take the risk, in view of how stable my Win 7 system was. I don’t envision the Win 10 system matching the Win 7 system in stability and performance, and it may all be attributable to the age of my system – speed of components, firewire, hardware from the era, etc. Might be a classic case of “if it works, don’t fix it”.

Thanks again. I don’t know how I would have found this advice if you hadn’t clued me in!

Windows 10 is better than windows 7 as well as 8,i feel.Using it sionce 7 months…Since the developer preview was out

Windows 10 seems to run better on my system. That said, If you’re still experiencing dropouts, there’s another place to look. In the folder you extracted your “Tools for MR” into, there is a folder named “Utility.” In that folder is a file named ysfwutility.exe. just double-click on it. It is a tool to set the parameters of the 1394 driver. You can set the buffer size (this is NOT the ASIO buffer, but the 1394 buffer) to small, medium or large, and you can set the 1394 speed to either 400 or 200. Try setting these to the most forgiving settings, large buffer and speed 200. Yes, this will have a small effect on the ASIO latency, but it will further stabilize your system. If everything works at these conservative settings, you can gradually sneak back up on tem until you find the point where you have consistent performance at the highest speeds your system will allow.

Well thanks once again, rtorstrick! That’s another utililty I didn’t know about. The changes didn’t seem to affect anything, but that last one you gave me about the 1394 driver seems to have completely solved the dropout problem, and also made it so that ASIO-Guard is working without dropouts, which is something that never really worked back on Windows 7 for me. So this is a great bonus, and I think I’ll happily stay on Windows 10.

Given my experience with PC’s, and Mac’s (computer tech for way too long) I would not upgrade if your system is working well. Windows 7 is the last OS you will see from MS that does not focus heavily on being networked and gathering demographics. I really think you’ll find Linux being a choice in the next few years. Windows 10 means endless upgrades and with every one there will be some software or hardware that needs patched. With users not wanting to move away from Windows 7 means that maybe thay don’t upgrade their daw. To counter this, it will only be a matter of time before companies like Steinberg develop a flavor of Linux for their DAW, just like Steinberg developed ASIO. If you look at the numbers, every PC is capable of running Linux, it only takes a change in how we use computers to make a company like MS to move in a different direction. That change has already happeded.

I’m still using Win 8, Do I have to upgrade my system to 10. I still looking for good suggestion about it. However, I have never face any problem when I’m using Win 8

I did that upgrade a few months back and it was fine. Win 10 is a bit better than win 8 according to performance metrics. Also, it’s the OS least likely to lose support in the near future. I have not noticed any differences in making the shift. These are weak reasons, but my SSD was getting flaky at the time, and I had to rebuild anyway. So I took the plunge.

Win8 was working fine for me and I didn’t want to risk losing my operational DAW, so I did a LOT of research before making the change. Most of this concerned software and driver compatibility with windows 10. How much software do you have installed, and will it all run under windows 10? (If not, does losing it bother you?) Among the issues I checked out before going win 10:

  • BIOS utilities and drivers for my motherboard/chipset.
  • Intel graphics driver. (Intel driver update utility exists on their website).
  • Audio interface drivers and utilities.
  • Printer driver and utilities. - What if you need to print a score or lead sheet?
  • MIDI keyboard driver and utilities. (Or other midi controllers that are USB direct to computer.)
  • 3rd party VSTis.
  • Diagnostic tools such as MIDI-OX, monitor speaker calibration software, etc…
  • UPS (uninterruptible power supply) drivers and software – my old SSD may have been corrupted by too many power outages. You really want a UPS if you have this issue. (I recommend Cyberpower because its output is NOT a stepwise emulation of a sine wave. Those emulations are unacceptable to many modern power supplies, which will shut down in self defense when they see this “power”. I have a finicky power supply. It has accepted Cyberpower’s output is tests and in an actual outage.).
  • Any other important software used in work related to audio, such as a video editing package.

This list may seem odious, but I found no serious problems. That was a while ago. Things are probably more favorable now. However, I think you should look before you leap if you have a healthy fear of unhappy surprises.

If you use your computer for general purposes, the list of vulnerable software may grow quite long. How much work you feel like putting into preserving those apps is beyond the scope of this commentary.

U can switch updates off. The same with the spy ware included in w10.
I can with win10 pro.

Check out your device manager open select VIEW from the toolbar menu and then click Resources by Type.
Scroll down until u find the 1394 controller and check if its shared.
If your motherboard supports irq settings in the bios u can isolate the firewireport. after that u have to go to systemconfiguraion in w10 to the second tab and choose advanced options. Then select PCI lock.
That way it would work without sudden dropouts.

If not check 2 Tools to Detect Problematic Drivers causing Audio or Video Streaming Dropouts
or Resplendence Software - LatencyMon: suitability checker for real-time audio and other tasks
In most cases the NVIDIA drivers causing latency spikes, depending on your card you can hotfix that. (google)
NVIDIA causing most bugs in windows for me over the years.

My computer configuration is the same but only 4gb ram you do not know if I should upgrade it