Tip for restoring a sluggish computer
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by normanw
(1284 messages posted)
In view of the number of complaints of slow-
running computers that apper on this forum,
the follownig is offered in the hope it may
help to ease some of the frustration.
When trying to restore normal operating speed to a
computer that has become sluggish, the usual clearing
out of junk files and pruning of startup programs
sometimes makes little difference.
An item usually overlooked, but which has a dramatic
influence on a computer's speed, is the hard disc's
data transfer mode.
In Windows XP this is set to DMA by default but if
more than a certain number of errors occurs during
disc access, Windows resets it to PIO mode and
refuses to allow DMA to be restored. However,
there is a fairly simple manual method to achieve
this as follows.
CHECK WHETHER DMA IS ACTIVE
===========================
First, to check whether or not your disc is operating
in DMA mode, right-click My Computer and select the
Hardware tab.
Press Device Manager.
Select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.
Double-click Primary IDE Channel.
Select the Advanced Settings tab.
Under Device 0, the value in Transfer Mode
should be DMA if available.
(Ignore the settings under Device 1 for now.)
Under Current Transfer Mode the value should be
a DMA mode.
If either of these two fields contains PIO and
offers no DMA alternative, you need to restore
DMA operation to the disc as detailed below.
RESTORE DMA MODE
==============
WARNING: This procedure requires a modification of the
registry, so be sure to back it up before proceeding.
1. Make sure you are logged-in to an adminstrator account.
2. Run regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Take great care to select the correct key because there will be
many in which the section within the brackets differs
by only one or two digits and/or letters.
3. Click the plus sign to the left of the key to expand
the list of subkeys, which will include several numbers
such as 0000, 0001, 0002, etc.
4. Open each of these subkeys in turn until you find the
one in which the DriverDesc Data value is Primary IDE Channel
5. Locate MasterIdDataCheckSum further down the list
and delete it.
6. Exit regedit and reboot.
Repeat the DMA check procedure above to confirm that DMA
is now active.
-------------------
You can repeat the process for the Device 1 on the
primary IDE channel and also for both devices, if any
on the secondary channel. Note that CD/DVD drives will
operate at a lower DMA setting than a hard disc and this
will be reflected in the reported DMA modes.
SUGGESTED CLEANUP PROCEDURE
===========================
When attempting to restore the computer's speed, it is
suggested that you follow this sequence:
1. Check for DMA mode and restore if necessary.
2. Clear out all temporary and junk files - CCleaner is
recommended for this.
2. Use msconfig to disable all unnecessary programs at startup.
3. Defragment the disc, including a boot-time defragmentation.
Routine defragmentation is not really necessary under Win XP
but it is still a good idea to do it occasionally say, once
or twice a year, especially if you run many different
applications and process large amounts of data.
Defragmentation in the current instance ensures you are
doing everything possible to restore the machine's
performance. The Windows built-in defragmenter is better
than nothing but does not do a very good job.
Fully-fedged utilities such as Diskeeper are far more
thorough.
Note: If the disc access setting keeps reverting from
DMA to PIO mode, this indicates a more serious underlying
problem of repeated errors that needs to be investigated.
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 | Tip for restoring a sluggish computer (normanw: Tue, Mar 17, 2009, 9:32 pm) |
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