CD-Rom slows down system....

PsychoMark

PsychoMark

^ bored.
There I was, all happy, just bought a new 1.8 Ghz after three years working on a P133. Talk about difference, that thing is fast :D.

But now the trouble starts: every time I copy a file from my cdrom my whole system practically dies. Cursor shocks, MP3 stops (or at least sounds awful) and I can't do anything until it's done. Tested it on two other computers, had exactly the same thing (in. The weird thing is, on my P133 I could play MP3 and do CD-Rom access without any problems :confused:. What's wrong?


All tested systems are running Win2K Pro, two without SP's, one with SP2. The old P133 and the new Intel 1.8 used the same CDRom player (Sony 40x speed if I'm correct), one of the other systems uses a Plextor 24x10x40... I had nothing running except Outlook Express/MSN Messenger/Winamp, CPU and memory were at a minimum...
 
HomeLAN

HomeLAN

Bumbling Idiot
Staff member
2 thoughts -

1) Is this CD-ROM a slave to the hard drive, or is it on it's own IDE cable? Should be on a separate channel from the hard drive.

2) Is DMA enabled on the CD-ROM?
 
PsychoMark

PsychoMark

^ bored.
1. Seperate cable
2. I could not find the setting when selecting the cdrom in the hardware settings, however, I did notice that 'PIO Only' was set for Device 0 on the secondary IDE, maybe that's the problem...
 
PsychoMark

PsychoMark

^ bored.
:eek: After a reboot it showed 'Ultra-DMA-mode' in the hardware settings, and not only did my system repond correctly, it also copied about 5 times faster :D

Thanks :)
 
Huge

Huge

Holla if you hear me!
Staff member
Why does 2k default to PIO mode on CDROMs? I noticed that on my laptop after a new install of 2k, it defaulted to it. What exactily is PIO mode anyways? :confused:
 
G

greenfreak

New Member
Steve, stupid question... Where can I look up my own settings? I installed an old crummy CD ROM and a new one in this computer, and although I don't use them much, I'd like to get as much as I can out of them.

There's nothing about PIO in Device Manager properties, are we talking about a BIOS thing?
 
PsychoMark

PsychoMark

^ bored.
Look in the device manager for IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, in my case there are 3 devices listed in that catagory, two of which are 'Primar-' and 'Secondary IDE Channel'. If you take a look at the 'Advanced Settings' tab in the properties, you can find the settings there...
 
fury

fury

Administrator
Staff member
My CD-ROM was always PIO on WinXP and I couldn't change that if my life depended on it. Installing the VIA drivers a billion times didn't fix it

So I dumped XP, installed 2k, somehow both my hard drive AND cd-rom were set to pio, so I dl'd and installed via 4.37 drivers, and voila, no more crap performance! wee! :grin:
 
Shadowfax

Shadowfax

Bla
Heh Mark! Thanks for the reminder....I can recall to have done this like 4 formats ago...but never thought about it since then.
I've put my secundary IDE controller to DMA, and copying and accessing goes quite a bit faster!

Thanks! :)
 
fury

fury

Administrator
Staff member
I know someone who is using a P100 with Win98, and is forced into PIO because his board cannot use DMA mode. *shudder* :eek:
 
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