Windows may not be taking full advantage of your IDE drive's speed
. Ultra DMA drives are capable of burst transfers at more than 33MB
per second, double the rate of a standard IDE drive. In Windows 95
and Windows 98, this feature is disabled by default. To enable the
DMA option, open Device Manager, expand the Disk Drives branch of
the device tree, and select the icon for the UDMA drive. Click on the
Properties button and then on the Settings tab. Check the box labele
d DMA, close all dialog boxes, and restart your system.
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The problem is not Windows; your
CD-ROM drive is to blame. You can
hear it spin down to conserve energy, and the next time you access a
file on the disc, you have to wait while the motor gets back up to speed.
If you have a Toshiba CD-ROM drive or DVD player, there's a nifty
Toshiba-supplied Control Panel
add-in that lets you adjust the spin-down time from its default of 32 seconds
to as high as 32 minutes. It also lets you throttle a 32X drive back to
4X, which may, paradoxically, improve performance with some disks. You'll
find the free CoolLittleTool download at
ftp://resource.toshiba-europe.com/europe/diskdriv/downloads/CoolLittleTool.exe.
Plextor drive owners can use the Plextor Manager 96 utility the company includes with each of its drives to set spin-down time. If your CD-ROM driveis from a different manufacturer, check out the comprehensive collection of utilities from Computall Services at www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa571/Download.htm. Among the available offerings is Spindown, which lets you tweak the setting for nearly any drive. Although the command-line interface for this utility is daunting, it will keep your CD-ROM drive running at full speed, without all those fits and starts.