Ok, I have decided to hold off on installing the Miniport driver. Seems like the consensus at VIA Arena is that it'll be a self inflicted anal reaming to do so. VIA Arena apparently is going to be revamped and by late next week, there will be an overhaul of their "Engrish" documentation. I will wait until that happens before I try this Miniport driver.
Someone posted this over there that might be of interest to the users here:
"Windows XP And PIO
Jim McHie - 2/13/02
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You may already know about this, but it's new to me and I haven't found much on it by way of web searching so I thought I would pass it along.
Recently I began to notice my Athlon XP 1800+ computer with 512 MB DDR SDRAM on an MSI KT266 board slowing down a bit. Boot times took longer; load times extended. It was sort of gradual, so I didn't notice it all at once. One day I'm sitting here waiting for my computer to boot thinking, "This is slower than my old 95 boot!" My hard drive performance had really slowed down across the board.
When I set XP up, I made sure to go in and change the default PIO modes on my IDE channels to 'Use DMA if available.' After that, I had confirmed that the modes on my devices had switched to various DMa modes. So I didn't figure that's where the problem was with this slowly corroding hard drive performance. After all, I had changed the settings properly and not made any adjustments to them, so how could my problem lie there?
Then I looked in Device Manager. IDE 0 was set to 'Use DMA if available', but the setting being used was *not* the DMA mode it had been set to previously, but, inexplicably, PIO! What's worse, there was no option to change it back to DMA. It was 'stuck'.
The problem turns out to be an automatic 'feature' of Windows XP, as explained on this MS Windows Platform Development Web Site:
For repeated DMA errors.
Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.
In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.
Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).
So I uninstalled the Primary IDE channel and rebooted. Windows XP reinstalled the IDE drivers and redetected the hard drive. Reboot one more time with 'Use DMA if Available' and Voila!! Hard drive access was once again up-to-snuff, using the correct DMA mode.
I'm not entirely sure what errors I have had that qualified, but as an overclocker and gamer I have had driver issues, crashes relating to overclocking, and other occasional conflicts generated by my curiosity with trying all sorts of odds-and-ends. And to think, Windows XP was looking out for me the whole time by downgrading my data transfer modes!! I feel more protected by MS all the time; protected from good performance anyway.
Jim McHie
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