DMA Settings, Am I in the wrong place?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Flash
  • Start date Start date
F

Flash

New member
I know I was looking at one of the forums and they where talking about the computer being jumpy and stopping (ms) during the recording. One of the responces was to check the DMA setting for the hard drives. I was at work so I couldn't check mine till I got home and sure enough mine airn't checked. When I go to check them it say's "changing this setting may have undiserable effects on you hardware" I have 2 IDE harddrives and have kinda always had the same problem. I don't think my system is working like it should. Do I need to change something in BIOS or do I just say DMA and say O.K. when it gives me that message?
 
What are the rest of your system specs, i.e. pentium 1,2,3,4. What size are the hard drives? And are you running 98 or 95?

If your running win98 on anything higher than a Pentium 1, I'd spin the wheel and checkmark them. That is a normal warning message. The only time I've seen troubles check marking it was under win95 and/or with smaller drives that don't support DMA. If your drives are over 4GB they should be DMA 33 at least.
 
I went in and changed them. What a difference. All this time I've been mad because I thought I spent money on this stuff. Problem was I didn't know how to work all the stuff so well. I'm glad I found this forum and all you guy's, maybe gal's out there that know this stuff so well. I'll be hangin' around some more.
Keep jammin'
 
If you are running win98 there are several tweaks you can use to speed up the system, especially controlling HD accessing. One is the DMA switch. If you want it, I keep it handy on a notepad for just this faq. You can also go to Analogx.com and get his free utility for measuring disk thru-put, it clearly measures the effect of any changes you make.

shoot.. can't hurt to just post them again below

as for windows: PLEASE REMEMBER!!!!!!!!
these suggestions worked for my set-up, BUT I can't guarantee this for every system...and because winlite uses some of win95 ie and some of win98 I'm not sure everything works the same or is set the same way as mine. My set up in straight win 98, bare bones but not "lite"

a good idea is to get a utility to measure disk throughput (to avoid "data cannot be streamed fast enough) go to
http://www.analogx.com and check out his free utilities. one measures throughput. there are others available as well.

First make sure there is nothing running in the background that doesn't need to be
click to Start Menu > Programs > Accessories >
System Tools > System Information. Click "Software Environment" and choose "Startup Programs". See what's running. Mine is very lean. To change things, go to the "Tools" menu, select "System Configuration Utility" and choose "Startup". You can disable any apps from running at bootup and it's easily undoable

some things may still be running, but if you took the initial suggestion and created a dedicated boot partition for audio woth no games or any program not vital to audio, except Norton Utilities so you can defrag and also fix the other windows partitions when they crash, or just recreate them with the image you made with ghost.


Vcache gives you "diminishing returns" after 4MB, so I just set mine to 4048 or whatever that 4MB number is.

Start/Settings/Control Panel/System/Device Manager/Disk Drives/Settings and ensure the DMA option is checked for your IDE drives.

Turn off Auto Insert Notification on your CD drives: This one is a biggie. Every couple of seconds it will scan for a CD in the drive if this one is on. Obviously we don't want anything like that happening. Go to Control Panel, System, Click CD-ROM and click your CD-ROM drives. Click the Properties button, select the Settings tab and clear the Auto insert notification check box.

Disable Read Ahead Optimization and Write Behind Caching: After years of telling us to turn these settings on, MS now tells us to turn it off for high speed apps like Video and Audio. Go to Control Panel, System Performance tab: Click the File System button and drag the Read-ahead optimization slider to None. (The default is Full.) While still on the File System Properties dialog, select the Troubleshooting tab and check Disable write-behind caching for all drives.

Keep the swapfile OFF of your audio drive. In one drive systems this is impossible. Use a two drive system, one for audio, one for the system.
also set the swap file so that windows doesn't waste time resizing it "dynamically", ie using cpu time
o back into the Virtual Memory settings window and uncheck "Disable Virtual Memory" then select "Let me specify my own virtual memory settings". Set the "Minimum" and the "Maximum" to the same number... though you may want to play with this, hmmm, I'm not sure what I used, 150?.

Format your audio drive from a DOS prompt with the /Z:64 option. This makes the default block size on this disk 32KB. This is a respectable size for audio, but too large and wasteful for other apps. Use this only on your audio drive.

Use the network server performance profile. Definitely test this one after applying it, it helps some systems, hinders others and does nothing for many. This profile aggressively buffers data in memory, which reduces time-consuming disk operations. To change the profile, right-click My Computer and select Properties, then click the Performance tab. Click the File System button and you'll see a setting for "Typical role of this machine." Change this to Network Server.

Check the "task Scheduler" and get rid of all tasked scheduled to run at intervals... windows automatically schedules its update program to check for updates EVERY 5 MINUTES.

I also went into my BIOS setup and did things like turn off my USB ports (which I don't use) because they share my highest PCI IRQ... thus competing w/ my studiocard. BTW, put the studiocard in the highest PCI slot.


I also suggest using multiple booting partitions and reserving one for audio recording alone and set it up wohth minimal windows and hardware configuration.
anyway, hope this helps
 
Cool site that Analogx.com I did grab 3 util's but couldn't find the one about measuring disk thru-put. I picked up the dll archiver, the maxmem and cache booster. Thanks for the performence idea's..... I printed it out and will keep it handy. Thanks again.
 
Back
Top