Improving Hard Drive Performance
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 14 Sep 2006 03:37:59 GMT
My computer is pretty lame. It is a lightweight Averatec 3280 laptop running Windows XP, and I bought it at Staples for under $900. This is half the price of a comparable Dell, so I willing to live with its problems. One of the problems is that whenever it hibernates, it comes back up with the wireless card off, so I need to turn it on then search for a wireless connection. Another problem is that the hard drive keeps dropping into PIO mode which makes everything really slow. So far, I have been deleting the IDE controller and rebooting twice to fix it, but this is a lengthy process.
Thanks to James Barton, here are some instructions for getting around this problem. I am going to try this on my computer and see how it works:
- Open up the Registry Editor.
- Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet \Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
- There are several sub-keys under this one, such as 0000, 0001, etc. You are interested in two of them that say Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel.
- Make the following changes to both of those keys:
- Delete any attributes named MasterIdDataCheckSum or SlaveIdDataCheckSum. This resets the tracking for errors that Windows uses to determine when the transfer mode should be lowered.
- Add an attribute with the name ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess and a DWORD value of 1. This tells Windows that it should lower the transfer mode when there are six consecutive errors instead of six cumulative errors.
- If they exist, set the following keys to a hexadecimal value of ffffffff (eight F’s). This will change the transfer modes to UltraDMA-6:
- MasterDeviceTimingMode
- MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
- SlaveDeviceTimingMode
- SlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed
- UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
- UserSlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed
- Reboot your computer and check the devices to see if they are set to UltraDMA Mode 6.
good help