Sampson

Actually, with an old clunker like my BX I am amazed it can still keep up. You've got a Super machine. Anyway, by memory, I meant that which was on the Video Card. The Nvidia cards have always been famous for their game playing, while the ATI cards seem to seamlessly work with DVD's. The test ought to tell you the burden put on the processor and the DVD. You did say that you went to the Device Manager, then to IDE ATA/ATAPI controller, then clicked on the Secondary IDE Channel, then right clicked for Properties, then chose Advanced Settings to find out if DMA was set?

While this is a "Dos" based image "backup" program, this is the webpage: http://terabyteunlimited.com/

This is a page that will test the drive. It might help: http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=dvdspeed.html

Also found a page that will test your DVD: http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=dvdspeed.html

Found an article at Microsoft about DVD playback and windows experience: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/winlogo/DVD/ Did you ever feel like we're just playing fox and the hounds with these machines? Anyway, the next likely suspect is your video card since everything seems to check out as to connections. Lack of memory and driver support can cause skips and dropped framerates.

It is 40 pin. Which knocked out my next theory - heat. The rounded cables usually allow for better circulation. The athlons usually run hot and DVD drives after a period of usage also run hot. Does this problem come up with the samed disk at the same spots or does it vary? Sometimes the media can have slightly different layers which can cause a slow down.

Are you using an 80 wire 40 pin cable?

I hate to be the only one to post to you. I hate seeing someone lose their serenity. First, there have been many who said they have problems with DVD and Plextor drives with Via chipsets. First suggestion check out to see if you have the latest Via drivers. Second, Abit may have a new bios, you can check that out. Third, sometimes it depends on how the DVD and CD drives are hooked to the controller. There are primary and secondary devices and master and slave relationships. How you string them in pairs makes a difference. As I understand UDMA and 66 and 33 drives attached to them, you are going to transfer at the slower rated drive. I am presuming that you have the Hard Drives as primary master/slave and the DVD and Plextor secondary master/slave. Part of the transfer failure may be in whether both the DVD and CD can transfer at UDMA at 66. As I understand it PIO mode does not drag one drive down when chained together. I have heard that some add a second controller card and put their DVD exclusively on it and have had success. Not much peace of mind I can offer, but some suggestions.

Since you uninstalled Zone Alarm, there may be some errant keys left in the registry that have not been dealt with. You might try some of the registry cleaners to see what the registry thinks is still installed. Be sure to backup your registry. While this does not seem to be an issue with XP, Q263939 in the Microsoft database relates to slow hard disk performance for Win2k. Since XP builds on Win2k, this may be another lead.

It may be somewhat complicated, but I got it to work on a Win2K system. You install your new drive as a slave to the old drive. Then, you Ghost the old drive using your new drive as a target. Then, make your new drive the master and either remove your old hard drive or make it the slave.

Sorry, Dirty Harry, I should have been clearer. I was making too many points. Some of it esoteric gibberish. There are spare sectors in most hard drives for defects. So, most hard drives are actually larger than advertised. But, as you put it, who cares for what you don't see when what you want is usable for your own storage. But, the question of "what you don't see" was my next point (lamentably not written very clearly also). The second point was that the operating system allocates bytes per cluster for storage. Normally, a floppy allocates 2048 bytes per cluster while at one point under Win95 as much as 16kb were allocated per cluster. What this meant was that if you created a document of 1kb and put it on your hard disk, it was really holding down 16kb of space, whereas on the floppy it was holding down 2kb. Lots of small documents on a hard disk were actually claiming more hard disk usage than was apparent. Alien's math is correct in speaking of size, what I was attempting to say was that depending on how the OS regulates bytes/cluster, the amount of bytes Explorer reports about the size of files has to balanced against the bytes/cluster distribution. Sorry about the floppy issue. I was just trying to say that Explorer may report 10 1K files as 10K of usage whereas it may actually be 160kb used on the hard drive. In surfing the net with little 2k files building up in the cache means that a lot more hard disk space is used than is seen.

This is always one of those fun posts, but the arguments are too far ranging. It is clear early on that between AMD and Intel there was a race to see who could make the fastest chip. AMD won and the PIII 1.3MH was defective. Intel moved to the P4 to regain the crown in terms of speed. AMD changed the benchmark to "who could process the most instructions per cycle" as the real performance guide not raw processor speed. Hence, their new performance rating. The Achilles heal of the early P4 was the long pipeline coupled with a small onboard cache and the pricey Rambus memory needed to recover from cache mistakes. The P4 has now been shrunk in size, with a higher onboard cache, DDR memory support, and apparently a "as yet area" for hyperthreading to allow for more parallel instructions. Further, they are seemingly fabricating chips with a lower MH rating so that they can achieve some amazing OC speeds by raising the FSB. AMD is shrinking its size soon. Their chips run hot. To achieve some of the incredible results that benchmarking shows heat is going to be a byproduct. They are also trying to one up Intel with their 64 bit instruction monster as a the product of the future. Given that, the processor is still only as good as the chipset that works with it, and more particularly as these things gain in raw speed, the memory subsystem tied to them. The bottleneck as I see it is with memory. DDR333 (and if there is a DDR400) is beginning to show its limitation. The hated Rambus is actually proposing a solution that may be able to feed these hungry processors the instructions that can keep up with their appetites. So, it is still too early to declare a winner since not all of the cards are on the table yet.

Your 80 Gig hard drive probably has more than 80 Gig. Generally, there are scads of sectors that don't appear that are used for storing defects. You can't see these from your operating system. In the time of the dinasaurs when you low level formatted a disk, you could. In fact, XP and all MS products can only calculate the size of the disk from the type of file system they use to map the drive. If you are using NTFS, you automatically will lose a sizeable amount of space which is reserved by the system for what it calls MFT. Under the old 95/98 Windows once the logical drive exceeded 500Meg, a single file might report that it was 17,000 bytes big, but in actuality, since it might store the file in 16,384 bytes per sector, it was really holding down 32,768 bytes of space. 95os2 and 98SE corrected this somewhat, but you will always notice a difference if you copy a file to a floppy, you will see that the number of bytes it takes to store a file is lower than that reported on the hard disk. MS never thought anybody would ever need more than a 10meg hard drive. What the real crime here is the bloat of the products that we put on these disks that require such huge amounts of space.

If Windows XP is using a file, even if it is a log file for all of the henscratch it needs to do to keep up with certain processes, it will not let you delete them no matter what your security level. You will only be able to delete them by booting from your CD which will allow you to get into "DOS." There, you will have to maneuver to the subdirectory like CD\winnt. Type Dir frequently to see how the subdirectory appears since some of them may be truncated and use a "~" sign as part of their name. Anyway, be sure that the files you are after are not being used by the system even if they appear to be blank.

The Temperature seems to be a bit high. Noticed you have an IBM drive. There was some news about certain IBM drives not being left on for more than seven hours a day. Apparently, they can become flaky. With all internet news, you have to take it with a grain of salt, but type in the name of the hard drive in Google or one of the search engines to see if someone else has had this happen.

Turning off the fade effects from the Display Properties will speed somethings up. While it is rare, some antivirus programs running in the background can also slow up icon and menu redraws. I noticed this with InoculateIt (no longer supported by CAI).

That not allow here from SHS you dont it on MS web page now do you

That not allow here from SHS you dont it on MS web page now do you