I'm writing this account of the exact optimization steps I took that finally eliminated all crashes and glitches in PC recording in Win98SE in case it's of use to others.

I checked out the many "audio optimization for PC" documents that exist around the Web and also asked around what other people were doing and then experimented with the various recommendations until the system became stable. My current system (at December 2000) is a PIII 866Mhz with 512MB RAM and 115GB in two 7200 rpm ATA100 drives. My sound cards are the wonderful LynxOne and excellent Delta 66/Omni Studio combination from M Audio that has more than a dozen assorted ins and outs and is very flexible in its routing. .

Here's the things I did and the settings I now use that result in a very powerful rock-solid stable system:

0) Untangled Internet Exporer and other unecessary stuff from Windows by using Windows 98lite. This is one of the biggest things that resulted in a rock-solid and faster system.
00) Formatted my audio drive with /z:64 switch (Format d:/z:64 - makes larger clusters which read faster)
1) Virtual memory - min 1024, max 1024 (Control Panel/System/Performance/Virtual Memory)
2) Vcache - min 16384, max 16384 (in system.ini in Windows directory)
3) CD auto-insert notification disabled (Control Panel/System/Device Manager/CDROM/Properties/Settings)
4) Nothing in my startup folder (and used Start/Run/msconfig/startup to locate and remove other unnecessary items that were being loaded at startup - have to take care to know what they are). Of course, back up your registry before any of these changes!
5) All third-party memory management/crash protection/anti-virus tools disabled (*very* important!)
6) Defrag the hard drive regularly
7) Made sure read-ahead optimization was set at full (Control Panel/System/Performance/File System/Hard Disk) (note: for some people this works better at none)
8) Disabled write-behind caching (Control Panel/System/Performance/File System/Troubleshooting)
9) Ensured that double-buffering was turned off [in msdos.sys - hidden file in your root directory (there are shareware programs all over the net for editing it)]
10) Ensured that there was nothing unnecessary in my autoexec.bat and config.sys (in root directory)
11) Ensured that my disks were set to the DMA option and that I was using bus-mastering drivers (Control Panel/System/Device Manager/Disk Drives/Properties/Settings)
12) Turned off Windows clock (not really necessary on a current fast system)
13) If you choose to let Windows manage virtual memory, include this line somewhere
in AUTOEXEC.BAT:
DEL C:WIN386.SWP
So when your computer restarts it will rebuild the swap file unfragmented.
14) Make sure you have a stable version of DirectX (8.0 is not stable).
15) Disabled System Sounds (and screen savers!) (Control Panel/Sounds and Display)
16) Disabled Power Profiles [Control Panel/Power Management - you can also turn it off in msconfig (Start/Run/msconfig/startup)]
17) Put "ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1" in [386 Enh] section of system.ini
18) Set graphics to 16 bit 800 x 600 (actually I use 1024 x 768 but I included this info as it helps on some systems)
19) Enabled "Show Window Contents While Dragging" (Control Panel/Display/Effects)
20) Don't use any USB devices and disabled USB as Windows pings the USB bus every millisecond
21) Set computer type to Network Server (Control Panel/System/Performance/File System/Hard Disk)
22) Removed all modems, Network cards etc. (set on different hardware config - see below)
23) Turned graphics acceleration down a notch or two (Control Panel/System/Performance/Graphics - some say this is not good because it will make your CPU do more work). I had to turn mine down 2 notches because Vegas buttons got weird at higher settings.
24) Placed my virtual memory on my fastest disk drive using Release RAM Pro.

Another thing that can make a very big difference is to have nothing else at all on your computer other than your audio recording software. Windows lets you set up different hardware configs (Control Panel/System/Hardware Profiles) that you can choose between when you boot. Also using a program like Memory+ or MemClean or FreeMem or MemTurbo to periodically free up RAM can help a lot (before but not during audio use). Release RAM Pro is a great one of these kinds of programs that also lets you make your virtual cache and virtual memory settings (including selecting which drive to put your cache on) from within itself and it also shows your CPU usage.

Hope this helps.

Tony Rockliff