Recommended Operating System for Stand-Alone

If you want my opinion, I would use windows 2000 because it’s a Win XP without themes and lot of sotware you don’t need for a stand alone BBP PC.
Windows 2000 use less memory that XP or vista or 7… and the kernel is similar.

However, the most import is to make a clean install : format, install you OS, drivers, BBP and nothing else !
Be careful with OEM preinstall of manufacturer because they have lot of bloatware and craps !!!! So, you should use the original CD from Microsoft.

Be careful with drivers of your hardware, they can make problem with your OS if they have bugs or something else… Today, they are only made for XP and Vista.

Otherwise, linux is better but BBP doesn’t run on this OS ! 😉

My poor english don’t let me tell you more about this but Leif and other would probably help me ! 😀

Personally I would use XP since it’s still supported by M$. Unless it’s behind some other firewall (based on linux preferably) with very locked down access. I wouldn’t trust a software firewall on it to do the job.

At any rate 2000 and XP both have a bug where the box just won’t make audio at all after exactly 365 days, and you need to reboot the machine. I had over 200 machines at LimeLight Networks that I was managing for about 5 years, all XP SP1… and they all had uptimes of 1 year other than one that failed because of the hard-drive. If it hadn’t been for that, they all would have had 5 years of uptime.

Most guys that parrot Linux being more stable don’t like that hear that, but it’s 100% true. There is one thing about Linux that I will admit is that it’s more stable when you are abusing how it’s configured, and less knowledgeable about its internal functions.

Themes in XP can be disabled easily. It’s a normal service. Just stop the service, set it to disabled, "problem" solved.

nah don’t disable the print spooler. it’s not just used for printing believe it or not, and this is a hold over from the very ancient days of windows (think v3.1 and earlier). at the time the print spooler was running in a special space/mode with unique interrupts etc and was used for a lot of things other than printing messages, so you need it for legacy support of a shrinking list of certain things.

not sure how turning it off would increase stability even if you didn’t run into any problems by having it off. it’s one of those bits of code that is like a rock, and coded in MASM32.

there are lists out there by the way. 😉

I agree with JesseG.

Personally I don’t feel the need to turn off alot of services unless the whole package has a lack of power, but then your starting off wrong I guess.
I would just install the software you need and turn off stuff like indexing, system restore (on XP), auto updates and leave the rest alone.

From hardware point I would check the cpu’s TDP (power it uses) the less = cooler = good
For the motherboard I would choose one that has proven itself, so not the latest of the latest model. How many revisions on these things I see says enough about the initial release and eventual issues.
VGA onboard is almost a must.
I would also opt for a fanless system since everything mechanically dies.
Maybe an ssd hard drive since the OS and software will take max 5 to 10GB but we are still unsure how they behave in the future.

The worst part of a pc is hooking it up to a network and especially one that has internet access.
If you feel the need to have this one on a network, which I find is a must for remote access, then you need to create seperate VLANs on your network. This way you can set boundaries, use the same network infastructure and be on the safe side.

If you now buy a standard pc everything will run with very minimal cpu usage. As far as I know Leifs software doesn’t have any memory leakage.
My radiopc at work (I am so environmentaly ashamed of this approx 90Watt) runs in W2K and has an uptime of … 6733 hours now at the moment. There is alot of crap on it installed and has full access to the internet.

XP embedded still beats all of the above — significantly smaller and lighter than Win2k, and it can boot off a USB flash drive. This yields a fast-booting rock-solid audio processor with no moving parts!
The only downside is the way it’s licensed. They want you to pay $1000 for the tools to make an XP embedded image, and then $90 per deployed computer. Doesn’t really make sense if you’re building one machine.

One could possibly argue that you’d be alright with an XP Home license considering that you wouldn’t be including even half of the features of that, but I’m no lawyer.

Here’s just how slim it is:

That includes file and printer sharing which allows you to map drives on an XPE machine. In fact, it includes most anything you need — it can be A LOT slimmer, although it’s hardly worth it. This image is about 250mb before you install any machine-specific drivers.

///Leif

WOW! That’s slim.

You do miss out on network connectivity though. A blessing, perhaps? 🙂

///Leif