Monday, December 14, 2009

1004 - Techy stuff

Is your PC running slower than it used to? (notice I said PC so the MAC users don't have to pay attention) Mine has been and I finally put in the right combination of words in the google search box to generate an answer to my problem.

It seems that the hard drive talks to the main processor through a IDE data link that can use different modes. The modes are as follows:

PIO (old) (slow) (not good)
DMA
UDMA
UDAM1
UDMA2
UDMA3
UDMA4
UDMA5 (new) (fast) (goodest)

So I went to the place to look and found out my hard drive was talking in PIO. WHAT!!!! WHY!!! Well it seems if windows has problems it starts cranking down the speed to adapt to a particular problem. And it never cranks back up! So I found this site that talked about all the ways to fix it with registry editing, etc.etc.etc. Or, they said, hit this button and we'll fix it for you. Being the daring person I am I hit the button - FIXED! I know you weren't expecting that were you? PIO to UDMA5 in one button click.

Here's where to look to see what your IDE link is set at. Go to -

Start
Control Panel
System
Hardware
Device Manager
IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
Primary IDE Channel
Advanced Settings

Look at 'device 0's settings'. It should say DMA if available. If it says PIO only, and you can't change it, run the fix at THIS SITE. (lots of techy info there to)

WAIT!!!!!! Disclaimer - If something bad happens it's not my fault!



(I missed Friday the 13th yesterday.)(and nobody caught it)(see how sneaky it can be)

1 comment:

Amanda said...

Well looks like everything is still moving fast here :). I'm loving it!

I just need to figure out why my Mozilla Firefox keeps hanging. I've tried many of the suggestions found online but its still happening. The speed of things is keeping me from getting annoyed at this time so, I'm still living with it.