Has anyone tried this recently? I've been experimenting ALOT lately. Partly because working on computers is a tried and true method of distracting myself when things are tough and two I really prefer to use second hand hardware because so many useful machines make their way to landfills way too soon.

I reinstalled my laptop over the week after getting a Win10 ENT LTSC 2021 IoT license and somewhere in the process of doing that, or maybe vetting the place I bought the key from I read about how someone who works at some station or movie studio said that all the machines run Windows Server, none of them run Professional or Enterprise. So I found a place that sold me a Server 2022 Standard Key, and sometime soon I'm going to install it and we're going to see how it sets up with my Focusrite, and FL Studio.

My friend from FB who lives in Canada asked for help setting up a media server for him. Hes a cyber security guy and works so much that when he gets home he doesn't want to mess with a keyboard and I get it. He asked if I would be okay doing it in exchange for his old laptop and I said sure, as I figure I can buy LTSC for it if nothing else and use it for my code/man cave machine... he said it was a 17" tank and I'm here for it but I want to give Server a fair shot at its debut as my audio OS... what doth the island say?

 

windows server is pretty much the opposite of what you want, with tremendously more stuff running in the background

 

Out of the box perhaps but not really. WinServer builds give admins the option to disable whatever service(s) you don't need, something consumer Windows builds don't, at least not at the extent WinServer OS builds do. So you may strip down the build to just what you need. To do so though, you have to be really proficient in this, it's not something casual users will ever learn how. So all you have to do is consider is, are you eager to go through the fuss of learning how ot configure a really complicated (and messy at times) OS or just go with normal consumer Win builds and forget that WinServer ever existed .
Cheers

 

A possibly better/easier solution would be Windows Utility from Chris Titus. It is a Powershell script offering more control over Windows 10/11.

GitHub link:
https://github.com/christitustech/winutil

Windows Utility Improved for 2024 video:

 

I have a Windows Server 2019 with 1Gbps Internet Speed, an AMD EPYC 7502P 32-Core Processor, 224GB DDR4 3200Mhz RAM, and an Nvidia Server GPU located in a data center in Germany. My server has FL Studio 21 installed, and some other audio tools/DAWs are installed, and they all work great with no issues. I do batch work for samples, meaning sometimes I have about 4,000 WAV files that need to be LUFS Adjusted with some tools, then streamed back to a local deck, and then returned again.

 

My two cents.

I'm running Windows 10 LTSC 1809 on a 9900KF OC @ 5GHz on a Z390 Motherboard with a GTX 3080. When I first started using it a number of years ago I experimented with what services I could disable without breaking functionality. I have a personal list that works for me but might not suit everyone.

On a fresh boot I get 2.4GB ram usage out of 64GB. That's including applications in the background such as loopmidi, FanControl, Focusrite Control, OpenRGB, ESET and Sandboxie-Plus. I find it very smooth and with very little issue but it does require a lot of reg / group policy tweaks on initial setup to trim things down.

I use this for mainly audio production and some casual gaming (nothing recent).
I find W10 LTSC 1809 is perfect for my needs. If you have anything newer than a 9th gen Intel or similar then W10 LTSC 2021 would be a better choice. I know of folks who use Windows Server as their main OS for daily use but find it can be hassle getting some drivers or hardware to run/work.

Oh and I did try Tiny10 on my test rig but I found it far too unstable or breaks too easily for my liking.

 

I wouldn't recommend using Windows Server as a base for an audio production setup. It's a bit overkill for most audio tasks, and you might run into compatibility issues with DAWs and audio drivers. Windows Server is designed for more enterprise-level tasks, and you’ll miss out on some of the ease and optimization that comes with a regular desktop OS like Windows 10 or 11. Plus, there are fewer resources and guides for configuring it for audio. For smoother performance, stick to a standard OS. If you're worried about boot time, you could always tweak it with something like a booter service to speed things up.

 

Last edited: Feb 5, 2025

It has plus and minuses, a server is just a computer that serves things, this requires services to accomplish this, if you are not serving the applications or resources, its a waste of cpu cycles running these services, so they need to be disabled, this can take some time to suss out exactly what is needed and what isn't.

on the upside there is likely less telemetry running and you should be able to disable what is there. If you like working with computers, it can be fun and interesting, but its probably not the fastest way to get a music studio up and running on your pc.

I used to be a windows and unix sysadmin, and I run windows 7 64bit pro on all my music computers, and most of my non music computers. I still run xp on a couple older laptops for ripping cd/dvds etc.

most important thing, no matter what o/s you work with, disconnect your production machines from the internet. i usually don't even bother installing the network drivers on my machines that don't connect to the internet..

good luck...

 

just as any other Windows flavour, Windows Server includes bloat nobody needs,
if you have a spare license (?) then sure go try it,
but be aware OS info/flag may cause some (artificial) compatibility issues with various software and hardware because many companies do sell way more expensive licenses when using their products in server environments