Our rigs for live event production and streaming have been mainly Apple Mac-based but we also have one Newtek Tricaster Mini.

The Windows-based Tricaster has - due to updates, graphics drivers etc. - caused us more problems than our other rigs combined.. The Tricaster is way more unstable than our Mac-based rigs.

In our business, we all need rock solid stability and it needs to work every time as we want it - when doing a live show, we can't spend 2 hours trying to figure out, why the "damn thing" suddenly doesn't stream or record, as it should and until now, we've been placing our bets on Mac OS and hardware.

In 2019, though, we want to add a vMix setup, not at least because we find Apples pricing to be out of control and Apples blind eye to the pro community - we're in a competitive business, so spending loads of money on luxury hardware puts us in a place where it's harder to earn money. Not to mention dongle-hell.

So I'd like to ask you, how you keep your vMix windows-computers "fit" and if vMix on a good hardware setup is 99.9% stable or we need to accept, that strange things will start to happen when we leave the Apple platform?

Do you turn off all automatic updates etc?

The simplest piece of advice is to treat the PC like a job specific tool.

Don't install anything non essential.

Don't update stuff for the sake of it, Mac users seem to be obsessed with OS updates.

If it aint broke, don't fix it.