enable DMA?

[snidy]

Should DMA be enabled? If so, how do I check it in XP?

 

[Davegod]

er, probably, depends on what peice of hardware

pretty much any HDD or cdrom that isnt ancient should have DMA enabled. In xp go to device manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers > Primary/Secondary IDE Controller > properties (of each). Tells you on "advanced" tab.

 

[snidy]

Huh, no advanced tab. I can't find the setting anywhere. Is it differant with Nvidia ATA/ATAPI Controllers?

 

[Davegod]

hmm, maybe, i have a VIA board. There is no tab on the "VIA Bus Master IDE Controller", only on "Primary IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller" and "Secondary IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller" - I presumed both would exist on any mobo.

mine (a CD & CDRW on that cable, HDD should be DMA mode 5 or something).

 

[foofoo]

hi,
it is different if you have installed the nvidia sw ide controller. this makes the ide devices look liks scsi ones in the control panel. i was not able to figure out how to tell it dma was enabled but a performance check showed that it must be. unfortunately i kept getting "disk error during paging" errors with the nvidia driver and had to fall back to the standard xp drivers. just check performance of your drives, if you are in pio mode, it'll be obvious.
good luck