Cheapest, smallest PC-based system

[2wo]

What I love, is not only is all of your music at your fingertips but  90% of the time I "set random song mix" It is amazing the gems that come up that I would pass by when pawing through the stack, looking for what to play next. It has breathed new life into my collection...John     

[Grainger49]

Maybe I overstated my dread of ripping my CD music collection.  I have lots of spare time and will get it done when I decide to dedicate a computer to this.  I have a 1 TB outboard drive that should adapt to this.  I guess you are saying I should have a second as a backup, right?  

[Yoder]

I guess you are saying I should have a second as a backup, right? 

I would put your music on at least one external drive as backup. A little overkill on my end--I have my music backed-up on three external drives.

Also, a little shortcut to ripping CDs. I create a "New" folder on my drive once I have created and ripped all of the initial music. When I buy a new CD, then I burn it to the "New" folder. It is much easier to keep track of it for when I copy it to the back-ups.

[2wo]

My Vortexbox is networked to my PC. So for now I just copy the FLAC folder to "My Music" so I have it in two places. Eventually, I will put it on a removable drive...John

[earwaxxer]

yep - dig the rippin! I'm probably in mid stream on the craziness scale when it comes to ripping cd's. I have read about folks who are far "worse", but I have ripped my cd's several times over the course of my digital "education" (paranoia). Now I have all 850+ cds ripped to wav, lossless and backed up of course, and there they sit for the next step. Thats about 350gb. I think early on I was getting hung up on whether the copy was "exact". Hence, EAC and dbpoweramp. I can sleep at night now. My digits are there. Exact and unmolested. In some ways I do miss the tactile thing though....

[denti alligator]

I've give-up and am using my HTPC with a Juli@ that I had been using elsewhere.

My main question is: how do I configure Windows Vista to dedicate all it's energy to the music, and nothing else? I'd love a guide for this. Surely there are a lot of things running that don't need to be. I'm using J.River Music console as software, which is supposed to work well. The sound coming out of the Juli@ is pretty impressive. I can only imagine what a good DAC would do.

[Grainger49]

This is a small start at a cleanup.  Click on "Start" and "Run" then type MSCONFIG.  This opens the System Utility window.  Click on the Startup tab.  There will be a lot of programs there that are checked.  A number of them are necessary.  Others, like Adobie Updater are put there when installing programs and they lurk in the background running when you don't need them.  Only uncheck programs you know you don't need.

Click on apply and exit and restart.  When you restart you will get a pop up.  Click the "Don't show this notification again."

This will speed up any PC that has a list of 20 programs that boot with the computer

[2wo]

There are forums that have a lot of  info on this kind of thing. Try Audio Circle or AA...John