DMA enable?

I have just installed Neo DVD - an excellent program for making DVD's from downloaded movies. However, when I first ran it a warning box appeared saying that 1 or more of my drives may not have DMA enabled. I could well believe that, because it takes forever to move files from 1 drive to another, and everything slows to a crawl, CPU usage goes to 100% or close.

I am running XP Pro, with an athlon 1200 on a Gigabyte 7IXE4 motherboard, 512 MB memory and 2 hard drives, 1 X 80GB divided into 20, 20 and 40, with a second 60GB drive unpartitioned.

When I look in System information > Hardware Resources > DMA, I see the floppy, Parallel Printer Port and Direct memory Access, all showing OK, but no mention of the hard drives.

Can anyone tell me how to enable DMA, as I believe this would speed everything up considerably? I tried following the XP help, but it seemed very vague :(

Q-Buster

control panel , perforamance and maintenance , system , Hardware tab , device manager , IDE controllers , right click and then properties

Thanks sniper, tried that, the Primary channel was set to DMA if available, as was my DVD reader on the seconday channel, however my recently installed A06 was set to PIO only. I changed it to DMA if available, that should help the A06, but it doesnt help with hard drive transfer speeds.

However, strange things happen in my PC, my new sound card stopped working a few days ago, today I got arround to fitting the old one back in, when I started the PC, the sound worked OK - even though I thought I had uninstalled the old card; a little later the sound wasn't working again and in the control panel I found the Mute box had been ticked!! Beats me :( :( :(

Q-Buster

after you changed the controller to dma remove it reboot and it will drop in properly

how full are your HD's , defrag them . have they been like this since day one ?

The hard drives are pretty full, but they are defragged regularly, I even backed up a load of stuff to a bunch of DVD - RW's to completely empty a drive and reloaded it it again to ensure it was completely defragged. I suspect the answer is a fresh install of XP.

However, I am thinking of upgrading my motherboard soon, this will allow a lot of new possibilities like a faster processor etc, so shortly I might have to spend some pennies!!

I can live with it at present, but the upgrade day is approaching. Only problem is there are so many things competing for the money, I think I should stop visiting Biggys cheapskates section to start with (and then I will miss out on the motherboard bargain lol)

And back where I started this thread, some things seem to go smoothly enough, I can still run Neo DVD to convert and burn a Divx movie I have downloaded to DVD - RW in about 3 hours max, which I think is OK - isn't it?

Q-Buster