Well, all *I* can say is dat I yesterday removed the "PCI Noise card" and it *still* works here !
Of course I made it all confusing by posting about it in this topic as well as in the card's topic, but I honestly couldn't have both as a separate single subject, because the card DOES matter, and a lot !
But not for the better - not for Windows 8.
So to be clear : I now finally have W8 working in a fashion that I don't feel any urge to go back to W7. Not only that - W8 performs better than W7 now. It does so for the time I am playing with W8 again, which is close to a week. Trouble is : for most of the days this was with the PCI card in.
As you may have read from me in the card's thread "it can't go wrong, it sounds fully analog - FOR THOSE WHO LIKE THAT". Add to this the more or less blanketed feeling and you know what it is about.
No snap.
And this latter became very apparent when I removed the card and (this time) didn't change a single other thing.
Right away the square roar of Jon Lord's B3 was there and more so than I ever heard. It scared me a little because it seemed prone to too high dynamics again. But that didn't happen. Not last nigh at least and with nothing I tried to play for different types of music.
The "snap" is key. Without that all is too refined and of not too much interest. Fact seems to be : the PCI card is doing this. So, what about a noisy (adding) beast ?!
It just has to be so.
Again I played Who do we think we are, and this time it sounded as I wanted it. All the singing was back, and the accuracy could be heard again. This opposed to the blanket which only showed "analog" and nothing much the accuracy of the NOS1 can show. Nice for many perhaps, but (as said in the other topic) quite braindamaging.
What a releaf.
But the best releaf is that W8 finally works (can work).
I still don't know for 100% what exactly "created" this, but it very well can be the usage of the other USB3 hub. So, NOS1 in its own - USB3 disks in its own.
Otherwise the XXHighEnd tweaks may be too many by now to interpret how what contributes, my 0.76Ghz processor speed not the least. It will be too hard to track back all.
And I must say, all the little enhancements helped for sure, but I never really got there before. Now it works though, and people following my settings should be able to at least obtain the enhancements I achieved myself, outside the PC itself (which really allows for different stuff, sadly).
I changed my sig again with maybe emphasis on the "All Services shut off" which sneaked in there for the first dedicated W8 settings I put up, but which really can happen with 0.9z-9 only (but which I used for well over a month already).
Now let's put up that 0.9-z9 soon ...
Peter