Everytime my reader or writer would slow down, I was taught to go into the device manager, make sure each is set to DMA mode, then restart the computer 2 times. I haven't had a problem for over 2 years now. But the past week, I need to speed up my times so I did this and after the restarts it's still slow and the writer shows up in PIO mode still. I'm pretty lost seeing as how this has always worked for me and now it's not.
Well XP sets a device to PIO if it detects a certain amount of errors. Try deleteing the device driver for the controller that the device is connected to. Then restart and XP should re-install it with DMA active.
Actually I meant to say I usually uninstall them like that, but now it is not working. I don't know why it's all of a sudden not working.
