on third thought, it's noticeably slower, and the time presented is varying wildly. my previous stable image didn't do that - it calculated it properly and just ticked down. but, vista/7 does do that. to the world's annoyance. so, i'm on the other side of some updated dll that i'd rather not be on, but the slow down is only roughly 30% (only 30%, lol, but you only notice it for big transfers), so i'm not willing to go through the headache of rolling back.

if it presents something more bothersome, sure. right now, i want to get back to recording.

shit is otherwise up, tested and working. i don't know how long this is going to take, but i'm glad to get back to actually laying down some tracks. it was ridiculous that the machine imploded the day before i was going to start actually doing some fresh recording (rather than sorting through and cleaning up old stuff).

but, i'm here. let's hope the floor doesn't cave in or something.

aaaaactually...

i was copying files as i was running my script, and it was horrific. chipset drivers were updated, but i hadn't yet ripped out 80% of the system. which is what my install script does. no exaggeration.

now that i have, copy is back to normal. what took me an hour a few minutes ago now takes 3 minutes.

this indicates to me that it's probably related to one of the many (almost all) windows services that i've actually deleted. i didn't say disable, i said delete.

it's still awful, however you look at it. there's clearly something in the os that is slowing down basic functions to absurd levels. as i pointed out in the other post, this is a widespread annoyance.

it indicates why i run my script, though

a little research seems to pinpoint the problem to a set of updates in about mid 2011, if people are curious.the way this seems to work, though, is something like this:

1) microsoft breaks something.
2) hardware companies refuse to learn how to change their drivers to fix it.
3) people get frustrated and buy new hardware that plows over what ms broke with increased speed/power.
4) profit.

the result is that increases in hardware performance are merely being used to correct windows, which gets more and more broken with each release cycle. we're constantly forced to upgrade to maintain stasis. it's like they've found a way to mimic inflationary monetary policy. let's just be happy those fucking cloud computers never caught on, or we'd be really fucked.

for now, quick fix is to put yourself behind a good router, lock your OS down the smart/hard way, don't have browsing habits that are comparable to your clueless grandmother (NO IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO RUN CUTECATS.EXE), never ever launch internet explorer (i've taken the approach of actually deleting the IE dlls altogether, which is technically illegal, but whatever) and stop updating windows...

or install linux. if you don't have expensive music hardware without linux drivers.

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

as a part of recovering from this mess (mechanical hard drive failure, followed by bad bios flash - fixed the bios, but the hard drive was not salvageable), i slipstreamed up to the latest xp updates. now, i'd normally do this by testing first, but the drive was wiped so that step got skipped.

one of the reasons i stick with xp (and will continue to more or less indefinitely) is that hard drive operations on my hardware are very slow with newer versions of windows due to a driver signing conflict that reduces to the computer industry being inept and incompetent, which is the result of capitalism. root of all problems. i ranted about this a few weeks ago.

but, what am i getting after the updates? the same fucking thing as i'd get with windows 7 or vista. it's taking an hour to copy a gb of data to an external drive, because of a bunch of stupid security bullshit. supposedly, anyways. as mentioned before, i think microsoft is just trying to coerce me to buy new hardware. it's preposterously corrupt, really.

of course, i'm not actually going to buy new hardware, i'm going to uninstall the "security updates". but because i'm slipstreaming, this is a time consuming pain in the ass.

i'm going to have to test it first before i go through the process. the thing i need to determine is if the security bullshit is getting in the way of multitasking or not. i can deal with slow copy operations for now. but i can't deal with broken multitasking...

.....running and tested....

i'm back in business.

i had to spend the last few days waiting for files to copy around all over the place. but i've now got everything filed and cleaned and reconstructed and recompiled and backed up and reburned and am just about to reinstall windows, which should launch the install script. i expect some minor issues to appear, but i also expect to actually get some tracks down within a day or two.

here i go...