Hardware – Swarley's Blog

Using the Numark Mixtrack Quad with TRAKTOR PRO 2

Post author:swarley
Post published:18 September 2013
Post category:DJ Hardware DJing
Post comments:67 Comments

The Numark Mixtrack Quad

The Numark Mixtrack Quad is a 4 channel digital DJ controller with a built-in audio I/O device that was released in Spring 2013 and marketed as the only controller in its class and price range that offers 4 channel capabilities.

It is essentially a 4 channel version of the Numark Mixtrack Pro II, which is itself the second version of the infamous Mixtrack Pro, reportedly the world’s best selling digital DJ controller. With upgraded platters and touch-sensitive backlit drum pads, the Mixtrack Pro II is widely regarded as the current standard for entry level DJ controllers, so the Mixtrack Quad comes from an excellent pedigree. Numark has been producing innovative DJ equipment for 40 years, so they clearly know what they’re doing and have an enviable track record for producing both pro and consumer kit.

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Battle of the SSDs: Intel 330 vs Samsung 830

Post author:swarley
Post published:16 August 2012
Post category:Hardware SSD
Post comments:0 Comments

I recently purchased an Intel 330 Series 120GB SSD in order to improve my ageing PC’s performance. My post about migrating an existing Windows 7 installation to an SSD was based on the installation of that new SSD. At the time, I mentioned some issues I was having with waking up from sleep/hibernate on the SSD. The stability issues gradually became worse, resulting in the following intermittent problems:

The PC would sometimes blue screen and restart during shutdown.
The PC would sometimes blue screen and restart following fairly long periods of usage (after 2 or 3 hours).
Filesystem index corruption was detected (and fixed) on C: by Windows 7 chkdsk.
Resuming from sleep/hibernate would sometimes result in a blue screen and restart.

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Migrating an existing Windows 7 installation to an SSD

Post author:swarley
Post published:6 August 2012
Post category:Hardware SSD Windows 7
Post comments:5 Comments

With the advent of affordable and reliable high performance SSD storage, the possibility of running Windows on an SSD for lightning quick boot times and highly responsive applications is becoming more and more attractive. But the thought of reinstalling Windows from scratch is not so appealing, regardless of how good your backups are and how organised you might be. There is a regularly cited argument that in order to get the best possible performance from new storage, you should reinstall Windows. I don’t disagree with that, but we don’t live in an ideal world where we all have unlimited free time. And in the case of migrating from a fairly old desktop HDD to a brand new SSD, I’m not sure how noticeable the performance improvement will be if you take the extra time to reinstall Windows from scratch, compared to just migrating your existing installation.

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