NOTE: Windows 7 and Windows Vista share many common elements. You should find the majority of the following tweaks work on both platforms.

Windows 7 and Vista comes set-up for a wide spectrum of users, hence the user interface is designed to look attractive, play nice sounds and provide the best web browsing multimedia experience it can. Due to all it's bells and whistles, Vista has a higher system overhead than it's predecessor XP and on lower spec machines can provide less than optimal performance when running a realtime application such as Scratch Live / ITCH / Serato DJ Intro.

For newer machines we recommend Windows 7 , especially if the manufacturer has shipped this new machine with Windows 7 pre installed by default.

If you've purchased a new PC with Windows 7 pre installed or you have up-graded your OS to Windows 7 recently you may not be aware there are several changes you can make to optimize your system for running Serato DJ software. This guide doesn't cover absolutely everything you can do to maximise realtime audio performance on a Windows machine but is intended as a good starting point. Those who are hardcore tweakers there are several web sites with further in-depth information that we link to at the end of the article.

Note: When you see this symbol: > it will mean “and then select”.

1. When I'm 64-bit

Lets start the ball rolling with a simple check for any brand new Windows 7 users. If you already have Scratch Live, ITCH or Serato DJ Intro running with Windows 7 then ignore this one.

Windows 7 comes in two different versions, 32-bit and 64-bit. Check your PC for which version of Windows 7 you are using, to find out:

Click Windows start > right click computer > properties and look for system type shown below.

Check your version of Vista is 32-bit

Here is what Microsoft have to say about the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft's FAQ on 32-bit & 64-bit Windows.