pio

[NikFiend]

ok here it is,my sister gave me her old compaq presario 5430,has a k6 something 400mhz cpu...i noticed it running very poorly and wasnt sure why, then i looked in device manager at ide controllers and both are set to pio and the tab to change them to dma is greyed out.i poked around in bios all the right stuff is enabled like ultra dma or something like that,is there anyway to enable dma in this pc?i had jus formated and installed win xp btw...thanx for any help

 

[NikFiend]

ok quick edit....on primary and secondary 'transfer mode' says dma if avalible but "current transfer mode" says pio

 

[TheMajor]

either ur drives are too old, or there's a detection problem
maybe flashing ur BIOS helps

 

[jolancer]

1. u shouldnt run XP on a system that old. u will have much better performance with windows 98se on there.

2. the computers motherbourd prolly only suppots pio, again cause its so slow and old.

- i know what u mean, i have an old pc like that witch im not using, it doesnt use dma either, cause its just too old.

 

[NikFiend]

i dont think thats the case...i had an old toshiba 200mmx machine with xp and it used dma ran pretty good and i used to have an older compaq presario then the one im talking about and it used dma and had much better performance than this one...i dunno im jus getting irritated this thing is running like an old comodore

 

[TheMajor]

my socket 7 board with my 200MMX supports DMA up to 66Mbits/s
and Windows XP will run very good at 400MHz...it even runs on my comp

 

[NikFiend]

it says its enabled in my bios...i know this pc wasnt this slow from the store....even win 98 runs like shit...suppose i'll try a bios flash

 

[TheMajor]

what HD's do you have?

 

[NikFiend]

the original is an old 4gb seagate....i took a 30 gb deskstar out of another pc and have tryed both by themselves and together on different channels

 

[TheMajor]

the 30GB should support DMA, but the 4GB might not support it