Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Tweaking Windows 10 on the Surface Pro 4 for Music Production”.
Hello, I’m Robin Vincent and welcome to my little guide on some of the basic tweaks. You can do in Windows 10 on the surface pro 4 to set it up perfectly for music production. So we’re trying to achieve here is to allow the surface pro 4 to realize its full potential as a music making device. But what I actually mean is that we just want to calm it down a bit so that nothing happens that interrupts the music that we’re making the surface pro 4. Isn’T a desktop computer, it’s designed to be a mobile device.
It’S designed with a processor that will clock down to save power that will not always be running at 100 % and that’s okay. If he needs desktop performance, you need to buy yourself a desktop computer. I make those they are awesome. They’Re fantastic, come on.
You know give me a call in and I’ll sort you out with one, but because the surface pro 4 offers something different in the interface in the portability and in the power that it has. It still makes it a really interesting, music making platform. However, there are things that we can do. The Windows 10 that’ll, give it the best chance of running well for music production.
Are we doing another video on full Windows? 10 tweaking for audio on desktop systems? So this is just purely for the surface pro 4 and also i’m not going to go into masses of detail. These are just the basic tweaks. I believe that you need as kind of a minimum level. However, I must say they’re running it without any tweaks at all has been working pretty well up to now.
So the key to all this is to stop things running in the background and to stop interruptions. So, although having sort of Facebook and Skype and Twitter and everything else popping up every couple of seconds to tell you just how wonderfully popular you are, those sorts of things can interrupt your music making, can interrupt your creativity and actually potentially cause doorbells and audio glitches Right, where was I enough? Talk, Oh with the business at hand, so the first thing to point out: is this really interesting button here in the Action Center, which is called quiet hours? You may have missed that entirely. I don’t know everyone. I’Ve ever spoke to about it goes oh, so that is a great button.
You enable that and you no longer get any notifications. It just suppresses them until you release it and they all come cascading in. I imagine so as a normally helpful button, all by itself. Just that little tweak is probably enough for most people.
It’S a bit like you know, flight mode, but it doesn’t actually turn anything off. It just prevents any notifications so step. One is going to be in our system properties, so you tap and hold on the start.
That brings up the awesome administrative menu and go to system. Then you go to advanced system settings go to settings on the performance. Now you can disable all the sort of animation and fading in and out and stuff, but I don’t think that’s necessary anymore.
You know the system is well capable enough. The graphics engine is sorted enough to do those sorts of things without it, causing any injury or problem to anything else, so tap on the Advanced tab at the top and you’ve got this thing called processor scheduling now traditionally on da w.zahn, dere, audio workstations and computers, We set this to background services. The idea being is that it gives the focus or the priority to background devices such as the SEO drivers that are running your audio interface, and that should hopefully mean that the computer is always going to prioritize that, rather than drifting off and go and do something Else next we’re going to change the page file.
Now the page file is a part of disk space that the computer uses for shuffling stuff about when it’s doing its stuff and things and actually processes and the amount of RAM that we have. They can do that. All within physical RAM without having to use a disk hardly at all, so you can actually remove the page file, but we don’t tend to do that. What we’d like to do? What I like to do I like to set it at a specific size? Oh that that’s always available to windows, because what Windows does is it tries to adjust that to accommodate other things that are going on, and it’s that adjustment that can take processing power away from your big music project that you’re running it. This also recovers an awful lot of disk space, because by default Windows tends to make the page file sort of two or three times their physical RAM and if you’ve got a lot of RAM like in this, I’ve got 8 gigabytes. That’S going to be sort of 24 gigs of space wasted for no real reason, because the computer is capable enough of working without it. So click on change, uncheck automatically manage go custom, size and then I like to stick in 4 gigs here, because it’s a reasonable amount and that just seems to work.
So that’s four: oh nine! Six and four: oh nine! Six and press set and you’re away now. Windows requires you to restart. We won’t do that yet we’ll do that in a minute. Now.
The next place I want to look is in the power settings. They can get to it from the control panel items here or you can again tap and hold here and select power options which gets you straight there now with a normal, desktop computer. You would change this to high-performance mode, but with the surface it’s set to balanced and actually isn’t a high performance mode. You can sort of hack your way through the registry in order to enable that, but I think in talking with Microsoft engineers about it, they would much prefer you leave it on balanced.
The reason being is because the processor isn’t designed to be on all the time and what will happen if you set the power to high performance? It just means it’s gon na heat up, much quicker, the fans will come on much quicker and then all start clocking down much sooner than it needs to so actually, in this instance, with a surface pro 4 leave it on balanced. However, there are couple adjustments. We can make so if we go to change plan settings the the turning off the display business, it’s a useful thing when you’re on battery, because it conserves power. However, when it’s plugged in you want to set that to never so that when you’re, you know playing on your keyboard or whatever your system doesn’t sort of turn itself off and start shutting itself down, which you don’t want to happen. So you will leave the plugged in bits on never next personalization tap on that in the control panel. Now you can calm down the theme. You can make it a more basic theme if you like, but again I quite like it. I, like it being lovely and fading and moving in and out and that kind of thing and beautiful, but one thing I would recommend too, which is turning off the sounds now these are Windows.
Notification sounds not the sound engine within windows, but if you’re using audio interface through big speakers and things like that, to suddenly get a notification come through or a Bing or you’ve plugged, something in it goes Bing, Bing, right sort of in the middle of a session Or something can be very annoying and in some cases it can take the focus away from your audio software and cause a glitch that kind of thing so to calm down windows for music production. I would go down here to sounds and select no sounds back to the control panel user accounts, change user, account control settings and set that to never notify what you’re doing there is purely preventing Windows from asking you every time you want to do something if you’re Recording a lot of plugins and audio software and bits and pieces, it’s forever asking you know you want to do this, do you sure you want to do? Is I sure you want to download this? Oh sure you want to run this. Are you sure about that? And every time it does it it sort of shuts the rest of the computer away and you get this thing come up and again that can be very annoying distracting and it can do bad things to audio software. That’S running in the background.
So if you just turn all that off and act like an adult and use your computer responsibly, there’s no reason for that to be on. So that’s the main control panel stuff, there’s a couple of other things we want to do. One of them is in a command prompt, which is always very exciting so again, tap and hold on there bring up the menu select command prompt with admin in brackets after it. So it’s running as an administrator so into there. You want to type power, CFG dot, exe space forward, / hibernate space off. Nothing much appears that happens, but what that does is it prevents? Hibernation hibernation is when your computer sort of sitting there all by itself, and they start shutting itself down and puts itself in this hibernation mode. So they can quickly come back out back to the desktop in seconds, rather than a few more seconds as if you’d shut. It down and start it up again, so one of those things I’ve never really seen as helpful.
I mean on really old computers that took ages to boot up then I could see how it’s useful Heather these days, these boot opens or 10-15 seconds. So I don’t see any reason why hibernation is useful, except in some kind of saving the planet power thing which is great, but what it actually does is steal. A whole load of disk space and finally, and probably the one that’s going to have the biggest impact – is to stop things starting up at boot. Up because nearly everything wants to run all the time in the background like anything by Adobe or Microsoft or or Intel, or you know what your onedrive is. Guy drive your Dropbox, your your Photoshop, your all sorts of things, love running in the background so that they can open up immediately or so that they can gather, updates and say: hey, look, we’ve updated or send you a piece of news or an advert trying to Sell you something yeah whatever, and all of that can get in the way of your music software working correctly so tap and hold on the task bar at the bottom and select task manager. Now you may see this as very little going on, in which case press on more details, and this shows you everything this that’s happening on your computer.
Now, one of the tabs at the top is start up tap on that and everything in there. You should disable. Whatever is there disable it? Okay, if there’s things that you think you really really need like, for instance, your audio interface and might have some kind of mixer panel that needs to be running at startup. In order for you to use it. That’S fine leave that enabled if you’ve got antivirus software running that you need to be, then you need to keep there then fine leave that running, but ideally turn that off before you run your music software, so that it’s done and out of and not taking up Resources in the background, but if in doubt just disable at all, what’s the worst that could happen, you can’t get to your printer quickly, so that should be enough. That should have done it, and any other tweaks you may need to do in the future will clearly be troubleshooting because something’s not working, perhaps as it should do.
But I reckon that what I’ve just done here is gon na be enough, and it’s gon na be, and it’s gon na allow your music software and your audio interface to run to the best of its ability. So there you have it see how that works. For you and if you’ve got any of your own tips or things that you find that improve the performance on the surface, then stick it in the comments below and we’ll have a look, but hopefully you’ll now be sorted. So, now that your systems tweaked go make some tunes .