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My first Newbie question, I'm so happy :P

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Father Rabbit

Registered
Joined
Apr 15, 2003
Location
My desk, duh
Alright, so I just built a new PC and everything is up and running fine except for one thing:
Whenever my Cd-rom drive reads a CD, everything else slows down. So I'm wondering, is it just litlle resource piggy, and whatever it is, can I do anything about it?

By the way, it is a BenQ 56x

If you need any other system specs, please ask, as I'm too lazy to go to my profile and make a sig.
 
Welcome to the forums :)

It's common for some hesitation when first accessing data from any type of drive (cd roms delay for longer than hard drives by design), but if ANY windows operation (for more than 30 seconds following inserting a disc) seems to be slowed as a result of accessing data from the cdrom, then I think you're right -- it's eating resources to accomplish it's task.
 
palee72 said:
Also, what IDE channel is it on? I'd make it SECONDARY MASTER...



WELOME TO THE FORUMS, AND YOUR NEW ADDICTION

Here is a thread that is discussing something similar..

It doesn't HAVE to be secondary master, but if you have an optical drive as slave on your bood drive's IDE chain, you *will* have more slowdown when acessing CD's than if you put the optical drive on a different chain.

The easiest way is to have all HDD's on one chain, and all optical drives on the other chain. However, for performance's sake, it's best to seperate like drives on their own chains. For instance, boot HDD on IDE0 Master, second HDD on IDE1 Master. Main optical drive on IDE1 Slave, secondary optical drive on IDE0 Slave. That way works best for copying and moving files between like drives (CD-to-CD and HDD-to-HDD).
 
I'm using Win2k, soon to be dual-booting with some flavour of Linux. I have DMA enabled and the CD-ROM is on its own IDE chain (still waiting for my DVD-ROM to arrive). I suppose it isn't anything I really need to worry about too much as usually when I am using the CD-ROM drive, it is generally the only thing I am using at the time. Still, the everything-must-be-perfect-with-my-system-or-people-will-die part of me wants this fixed.

By the way - thanks a ton everyone.
 
Alright, I'm bored and it's 2 AM here so I'll post a couple (maybe?) relevent specs (even though I have a strange feeling that VTech is kidding).
Abit SA7 mobo
512 MB RAM
P IV 1700 @ 1908 MHZ
480 watt Antec TrueBlue

On another note, my leg just started to bleed on account of my cat's razor sharp claws.
 
What OS and are you using a RAID setup for your harddrives??? I see the board doesn't have RAID onboard but maybe you have a SCSI RAID setup?


PS I never kid when someone needs help there buddy. :D
I'm on the night shift so for me this is normal hours.
 
Nope, no RAID. I'm using Win2k (as I said in my second post in this thread). And the only reason I figured you were kidding was that I probably would have been ;) .
 
The VTech said:
PS I never kid when someone needs help there buddy. :D
I'm on the night shift so for me this is normal hours.

Wanna help kick my arse again in chess? :D

Send me an invite, I think I lost all my game account info...
 
Father Rabbit said:
Nope, no RAID. I'm using Win2k (as I said in my second post in this thread). And the only reason I figured you were kidding was that I probably would have been ;) .


My bad, totally missed that part, is it 2K or 2K Advanced Server?
Reason I ask all this is there are several hidden tweaks in 98, 2k and 2k AS that you can do that may help with the issue. In 98SE for example, you can set the CD-ROM to its highest setting then back it down by 2 and then set the PC to Network Server, to stop the BSOD at restart and to stop the "It's now safe to turn off your PC" at shutdown. :D But it's all OS specific.

Your hardware doesn't seem to be an issue so I can see your point of view as a kidding deal.


PS - If I am loosing my Uber Geekness, of course I want others to buy a DVD!!! LOL!!
 
I'm using Advanced Server, so if you know any tricks in it that could help, I'm all ears. Or should I say eyes?


The VTech said:

PS - If I am loosing my Uber Geekness, of course I want others to buy a DVD!!! LOL!!


Dangit, that makes sense.
Next time Gadget...
 
Try killing the autorun feature and set the CD-ROM speed back by 2 from the max setting. I believe in 2000AS that is in the device manager but I'm not sure since it's been a while since I have used it.

XP has a few issues with Autorun as well so that tweak fits I guess. :D
 
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