Windows XP screwed me again

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Rochey

Well-known member
White Market Member
Joined
Jul 2, 2004
Messages
2,697
Location
Dallas, TX - Formerly UK
Just wanted to share a frustration...

My 3 year old dell laptop started getting slow. really effing slow. I was even getting glitches in music playback. not good when your demo'ing products and using it as a music source!

Looked at the task manager, 40% - 60% idling... but the processes didn't add up to that.

Annoying.

Got a program for free called process hacker.
Turns out, there was a significant amount of hardware interrupts going on in the system. something was causing a TON of interrupts.
An afternoon of googling found this link:

http://forum.sysinternals.com/topic965.html

Turns out, after a number of hibernates etc, XP thinks there's something wrong with the hard disk controller, and switches from DMA mode to PIO mode.
Sounds like it's basically bitbanging the hard-drive, rather than doing clean bulk DMA transfers.

Anyway, I went to device manager, removed the IDE driver and restarted twice.

Seriously. My machine hasn't been this slick/fast in AGES.

Just wanted to share my experience, and hopefully stop someone from throwing their PC out the window!  ;D

/r
 
Yeah, good tip Rochey, happened to me before. Same problem , couldn't get audio to play back etc, comp so so slow. Was like having a new machine afterwards.
Chris
 

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