pwnt.be

I can’t remember where I read this because, at the time, it didn’t seem like I’d ever need it (since my Plextor PX-708A burner seemed awesome at the time), but here’s a useful tip …
If you’re on Windows XP and your (IDE) DVD burner suddenly seems to have gotten freakishly sluggish—i.e. burning at a fraction of its maximum speed, avoiding buffer underruns all the time, etc.—, which usually makes Windows consume a shitload of CPU as well, then there’s a good chance it’s reverted from the nice (Ultra) DMA to the safe, but slow PIO for some reason. Now, on Windows 9x, enabling DMA was relatively easy: tap into the drive’s properties and tick off the DMA option. On XP, however, it’s slightly different. The access mode is defined at the controller level, so what you need to do is go into Device Management and then IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers. Then, just open up the properties of the controller your burner is on, and switch to the Advanced Settings tab. There’s a good chance you’ll find the Current Transfer Mode is PIO, and if you’re really lucky, you can (re-)enable DMA by changing the value of the combo box above it and rebooting. However, usually, you can’t, because Windows has gotten all conservative about it and decided that, after a couple of failures, DMA wouldn’t work at all. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: uninstalling the controller and rebooting will force Windows to reinstall it and reset the failure count, as well as re-enable DMA.
I guess this method also applies to IDE hard drives that have suddenly gotten slow, but, for those, you might want to consider this guy’s approach instead.
In other news, I’ve got a mean cold and with two lab exams coming up this week, I’m not too happy about it.