Improving Hard Drive Performance

Max Dunn — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:37:59 -0700

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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

"Improving Hard Drive Performance" by om

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:29:32 -0800

good help

Eschew Obfuscation: Improving Hard Drive Performance

Improving Hard Drive Performance

"Improving Hard Drive Performance" by om