From the BLOG of Pro Media Instructor Shawn Simpson - http://www.blog.protoolstraining.com/?p=264 Maybe it’s a sign of my age that I spend so much time thinking about how things once were. Windows has been a royal pain for a long time in the pro audio world. That’s why you find so many guys using Pro Tools who are bona fide PC haters. In fact, I would personally have fallen into that category with regards to my creative world… But not anymore. I guess my problem with Windows machines stems from the inconsistencies from one machine to another. The list of compatibility issues for Pro Tools systems on Windows is longer than the phonebook from my hometown. So imagine my concern when I found out we were adding a set of Terra Digital MX2 machines to our Dallas training center! Now before you get the idea that this is going to be something negative, I’ll spoil it for you…This has a happy ending. My first impression on taking these machines from the box is that they are built like tanks. The case is very sturdy; this is no plastic framed machine. Despite the strength of the frame, a single thumb screw on the back unlocked a side panel allowing access to the inside of the machine. We were installing HD systems in these machines, so the fact that you can still get a Windows computer with PCIx slots made this move a no-brainer. We already had a number of PCIx HD cards that are virtually unusable in the current Macintosh computers; in order to use them we’d need an expensive PCI-e-PCIx expansion chassis. Terra Digital has taken great pains to build machines that adhere to the compatibility requirements of Pro Tools HD users. These machines didn’t come preconfigured for wireless internet, so we added some Linksys wireless PCI network cards. I made the mistake of initially trying to use the supplied Linksys connection utility, which had mixed results. It took a Windows guy to tell me that the “zero config” tool native to the Windows systems worked better. He was right. Once I had a good network connection, I updated to Windows XP, Service Pack 3 and installed Pro Tools|HD 7.4cs5. Pro Tools fired right up and behaved beautifully. The standard issue plug-in assortment we use in the classes also went on with the greatest of ease. So in an earlier posting I bragged of how easy it was to install a group of iMacs in the Dallas facility. It’s official now though, it was as simple as can be to install the HD systems in the Terra Digital computers. These guys are even blessed by Digidesign officially, so it should come as no surprise that it all worked so well. After all, would Digidesign ever lead you astray? Well ok, not this time anyway.