I had a 600 mhz with 386 meg ram, 2 60 gig hard drives.
I ran two downloads from newsgroups,
burned cds and
played movies at the same time, little slow down.
Just testing one day I started viewing 3 movies concurrently and
running IE6, with a large Kazaa download running (25 at a time)
The pc ran fine until the 3rd movie started, then I got jerky motion
on the movies.
You clearly have enough cpu.
Glad you are considering the disk dma,
but do you have the cd on the same channel as the system hard drive?
Sometimes this causes a problem.
My hard drives are separate from the cd.
Hemlock
On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 17:57:03 -0600, "Furry Cat Herder"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
>"Sharon F" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>> On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 21:42:43 GMT, "Guy Quinn" <(E-Mail Removed)>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >Compaq 6330 desktop: P4 2.0 GHz, 512 mb RAM, 60 gb HD
>> >WinXP Home Edition, Roxio EZCD 5.3.2.34, Norton AntiVirus 2002
>> >
>> >
>> >I have noticed that while running some applications (e.g. CD
>ripping/burning
>> >and Ad-aware), my system slows down to an absolute crawl. I have
>recently
>> >been running Task Mgr in the background and, sure enough, the CPU usage
>goes
>> >up to 100% when ripping or burning a CD. Multi-tasking is next to
>> >impossible.
>> >
>> >I know a P4 2.0 processor is not current state of the art, but I was
>under
>> >the impression that I still had more than enough processor power and RAM
>to
>> >multi-task. It appears that's not the case after all. Am I missing
>> >anything or do I need to consider going to the next level, processor
>and/or
>> >RAM-wise?
>> >
>> >FYI - WinXP is current as far as updates go, as are the Norton virus
>> >definition files. I defrag and virus scan on a regular basis as well.
>> >
>> >Thanks.
>> >
>>
>> The bottlenecks aren't always the CPU. Data transfer to/from drives
>> will go at whatever speed it can handle and that's it. Some programs
>> are cpu intensive such as Adaware. This program definitely wants full
>> focus when scanning the system at very deep levels.
>>
>> Reserve the more intensive tasks for times that you aren't too busy
>> using the rest of the computer.
>
>This also sounds like his disk I/O might be mis-configured to not be
>using DMA. I can rip and burn DVD's with a 933MHz P3 and I don't
>bother with defrag, so I know my disks are an absolute mess. But I
>do have UDMA and whatnot configured on my disk drives, plus I have
>my DVD burner on one IDE interface and the main system disk on
>another. I burned four backup DVDs earlier today, plus surfed the
>net, paid my phone bill, printed off some crud, all while burning those
>DVDs (4X DVD burning speed, FWIW) and nary a hickup.
>
>You can find your disk controller settings in Control Panel --> System -->
>Device Manager --> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. You should see
>a "Primary IDE Channel" and "Secondary IDE Channel" entry. Under
>the "Advanced Settings" tab there should be options for "Transfer
>Mode". (These instructures are from this Win2K box -- I'm not by
>my WinXP box at the moment ...)
>
>-- Julie.
>
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