Suggestions for running Band in a Box, Realtracks, etc. with single Pentium XP computer:

While support for XP will indeed be going away, you still should be able to get BB up and running flawlessly with the system you have without resorting to spending money on it.

I have experimented quite a lot with XP and single processors during beta testing of Band in a Box thru the years, matter of fact I intentionally used an XP laptop for the last beta testing session, BB2013.

**1 gig of ram is barely enough for these purposes, I prefer 2g with XP, but have also intentionally removed 1g and ascertained that it can work with Band in a Box. Caveat here is that the machine loses resources during longer editing sessions and even when just playing back songs that contain Realtracks in a row. So I do recommend the 2g ram here. Without it, you can simply run BB until droputs start to happen and then close down BB, REBOOT the machine to get lost resources back, open BB and continue.

**With "only" the 1g of ram available, it is important to take good care of your hard disk because there will likely be more Disk Swapping necessary as your ram fills up.

**DEFRAG the hard drive. This is best done IMO using the free downloadable "Defraggler" program rather than the included Microsoft Defragmenter.

**Set the Hard Drive's Disk Swap utility from the Control Panel -> System ->HARDWARE etc. manually. Set it to twice the installed ramsize. For 1g of physical ram, that would mean setting the Disk Swap to be able to use 2048. Don't accept the "let windows handle" automated dealie, they have no idea the kind of streaming we need to do, they are thinking "burst" rates.

Defragging the disk is likely going to be your most important thing to do in order to get BB to play properly.


--Mac

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