Multi Tasking

[milne]

I have a 1.4GHz, 512 DDR with 2 HD's on their own ribbons and both set as master. I have a DVD off of one ribbon and a CD burner off the other, both as slave.
I copy a 250MB file to a CD and when I do so....I can't do anything else. I can barely chat on Yahoo for fear it is going to lock up. What gives...I know I should really be doing anything while burning a CD but in principal, shouldn't I be able too? There is hardly any CPU usage or memory usage showing through all of this.

I think my swap is set at double the RAM. Any suggestions??

Pete


"The misery of low quality remains long after the pleasure of low price has gone"

 

[lhgpoobaa]

hmmm
sounds like a DMA problem.

1. go into your bios and ensure that DMA is enabled for all drives.

2. go into your system -> device manager. check that all hard drives have write caching enabled. then check that the primary and secondary IDE channels have DMA or UDMA enabled. PIO is a big no-no.

3. then reboot, and check to see if DMA has been taken up properly.

Win2k seems to be somewhat picky with enabling DMA mode... manytimes leaving me with extreemly slow drives.

My Next Performance System!!! - P4 Celleron, 128k cache, SDRAM, Integrated graphics, 5400rpm HDD!

 

[milne]

Nope,

Everything is set like you stated.

Thanks for the input!


Pete


"The misery of low quality remains long after the pleasure of low price has gone"

 

[jc14all]

If you want true multitasking SCSI will give you that. SCSI is optimized for NTFS. SCSI is multithread IDE is not. Here is some <A HREF="http://scsi.radified.com/scsi_07.htm" target="_new">comparison</A>, but I'm not saying SCSI is better. Just that it is optimized for NT.

<font color=purple><b>An average human brain weights aprox. 3lbs., but a thought weights a load.</font color=purple></b>