I recently got a gateway M680 laptop. it is Pentium M 2000MHz has 1Gig Ram. I used to burn dvds preety fast in 5-10 minutes depending on the other programs I am running at the time. I noticed it became slower to copy files from dvd to my hard drive, then when i tried to burn a dvd it takes hours to burn it and the resulting product is not even good. there is something wrong with the music or sometimes the video, too. I am using Nero 6 so I upgraded it to 6.6. I tried the DMA /PIO my device 0 is at DMA if available and it is Ultra DMA mode 5. device 1 is at DMA if available but it is PIO Mode. I look for upgrades at gateway but there is no updates for my laptop. I seriously dont know what else to do. Smart people help me!
Enabling Direct Memory Access or "DMA" for faster DVD copying Checking and setting the DMA settings is an important part of configuring PC for recording DVDs. http://www.dvdplusvideo.com/dvdguide005.html From Microsoft: "Basically, DMA or Direct Memory Access is a system that allows devices in your computer to transfer data directly to and from RAM without having to use the CPU as an intermediary. This boosts the performance of your PC significantly as not only the device from which the data is being read responds quickly, but also leaves the most important component, the CPU, free for other critical operations. However, the UDMA or the Ultra direct memory access is further advancement over the DMA technology that uses even higher data transfer rate thereby boosting the overall performance of the PC. 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). If the mini-IDE driver for the device does not support stepping down transfer modes, or if the device is running UDMA mode 0, Windows XP will step down to PIO mode after encountering six or more CRC errors. In this case, a system reboot should restore the original DMA mode settings. All CRC and timeout errors are logged in the system event log. These types of errors could be caused by improper mounting or improper cabling (for example, 40-pin instead of 80-pin cable). Or such errors could indicate imminent hardware failure, for example, in a hard drive or chipset. Let's take a look at enabling DMA in a computer using Windows XP. To get started, you need to first open the Device Manager. There is more than one way to do this, I will describe two. * Method 1: 1. Click Start and Open Control Panel. 2. Click on "Performance and Maintenance". 3. Click on "See basic information about your computer". 4. This will open the System Properties menu. * Method 2: 1. Click Start and then click on My Computer. 2. On the right, find the Systems Tasks menu and click on "View System information". 3. This will open the System Properties menu. GO HERE TO SEE PIXS OF SETTINGS IN XP http://www.dvdplusvideo.com/dvdguide005.html You can try tweaking the registry settings to reset the error count. Be very careful here. Backup your registry before proceeding. Run REGEDIT. Go to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} It has subkeys like 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. Normally 0001 is the primary IDE channel, 0002 the secondary, but other numbers can occur under certain circumstances. You have to go through these subkeys and check the DriverDesc value until you find the proper IDE channel. Delete MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveIdDataChecksum, depending on whether the device in question is attached as master or slave, but it can't actually hurt to delete both. Reboot. The drive DMA capabilities will be redetected. Open Device Manager again and check whether the device is now actually using DMA mode. If so, congratulations, you've made it (at least until the next time Windows disables DMA)
thank you very much for the walkthrough. it is very helpful. The thing is I have a stupid follow up question. I dont have secondary IDE channel, is that normal? so should I uninstall primary IDE channel and I am scared to do that. if device 0 is my hard drive what is device 1 ?
0002 should be your primary IDE, go in there and delete the SlaveIdDataChecksum you should be setup as follows: Primary Master: C:\ HDD Primary Slave: Burner Secondary Master: None Secondary Slave: None
