Enable DMA for best performance of Peripherals..

'DMA' stands for Direct Memory Access. It helps to Peripheral to read & write to system memory without the interference of CPU. Hence this feature improves the system performance as CPU is not involved in the tasks.

Today most of the peripherals like CD/DVD writers & ROMS support this feature. But sometimes by default this feature remains off in Windows XP. So if you want to check the status of this DMA follow these steps :-

• Go to Start & then Control Panel.
• Now click on System icon then System Properties will be opened.
• Now click on Hardware & then on Device Manager..
• Go to IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers & then Go to Primary IDE Channel..
• Under the tab Advanced Settings, check Transfer Mode
• The transfer mode should be on 'DMA if Available'
• If it's on 'PIO only' then change it to 'DMA if Available'
• Also do the same check for Secondary IDE Channel..

And then you will be able to take advantage of this feature of your device..


Bob Matharoo