PC woes corrected

Wanted to share something that gave me grief for about a week. Those of you that have XP may want to listen. It may be old news to you that have had XP for a while, but I am a newbie and I couldn't correct this until I stumbled across the solution on the net.

I was enjoying the new PC very much. Speed beyond my wildest dreams. Then it happened...I didn't know what, but I just knew something was wrong. Everything got very slow. It took over 4 minutes to boot up when it had taken mere seconds before. I couldn't play any audio (CD or otherwise) without it sounding all distorted and choppy). The mouse cursor was even jerking across the screen. The hard drive light was on almost continuously.

I started removing programs that I had installed thinking that something was bad. I updated many of the drivers. I can't begin to list all of things that I tried, even playing with the BIOS settings, but to no avail. It did not improve.

Then I stumbled across this article online that describe an interested "feature" (as Microsoft would like to call it) that controls how I/O is processed. There is the old format known as PIO or programmed input/output and there is the new format known as DMA or UDMA for Direct memory access and Ultra direct memory access. The article said that Windows XP will sometimes revert its IDE controllers back to PIO if it experiences too many errors on the input. Often this will happen when playing a CD with too many scratches for instance. While PIO is much more dependable that DMA, it is prohibitively slow. My CPU was pegged at 100% anytime I tried to do anything.

This described my situation to a 'T' and I was excited to get home and see if mine had in fact reverted to PIO. IT HAD!!! I changed it back, rebooted, and voila!! Good as new. Boots in mere seconds and everything is super fast again.

You guys with Windows XP might want to check yours to be sure. Go to control panel, system, the hardware tab and click the Device Manager button. Now click the plus sign next to IDE controllers and you will see some that say primary and some that say secondary. You will need to right-click each of these individually and do a Properties on them. Select the Advanced Settings tab. Check for PIO referenced anywhere on this tab. If it is referenced, then cancel out of the current window and right click the same IDE channel again, but this time select uninstall. Windows will prompt you to restart, but you do not need to until you have check all of the IDE channels and deleted the ones that you need to. Now reboot. Windows will reinstall the IDE controllers and they will initially come up with DMA active. They may revert to PIO mode again on their own at some point, but then you will have to look into why this continues to happen. Mine have not switched back so far.

Hope this might help someone.
Justin