Media Composer Windows XP install 3GB

If you are an Avid Media Composer user, and you’re like me, you’ve been hestitant to upgrade to Windows Vista.  After all, Windows XP Professional has been a steady workhorse for Avid Media Composer users. With the Microsoft's Windows 7 coming out soon, it may be worth completely skipping out on upgrading to Windows Vista. 

That being said, if you are a Media Composer user running Windows XP 32bit, you may need to take the extra step of modifying the boot.ini file for Windows XP.  This is because the maximum amount of memory that Windows XP Professional can use is limited to 4GB.  Worse yet, the virtual address space for applications is still limited to 2 GB.

In the past, running with only 1 or 2 Gigs of memory wasn’t a big deal.  But now, since every retail version Media Composer comes bundled with Avid Marquee and Avid FX, memory resources can become scarce.  In my case, my Media Composer software would crash quite frequently when attempting to use the Avid FX plugin.

The fix is to run the /3GB switch which will allow the Media Composer software to access an additional 1GB of ram.  Again, doesn’t sound like much, but it made a huge improvement on my own system.  My Avid FX plugin no longer crashes my system after performing the upgrade.

Run the install 3GB program located on the c:/program files/Avid/utilities/3GB. A command prompt will open up with recommend settings for changing the boot .ini file.

As an additional side note, when upgrading your systems memory, I reccomend purchasing memory from a discounter like Crucial memory. I also reccomend running their system scanner to detect which memory is compatible with your system.  Also, it's probably worth pitching your old memory so you can run all new memory with matching speeds.  Myself, I couldn't believe the performance increase moving from 2GB to 4GB with the faster memory.