I have an Asus P4SDX with Sis655 Chipset, 512MB RAM, GeForce2 MX400 video, HD's - WD80GB and WD60GB and I'm running Win98. My system has been running somewhat slow lately (even after Defrag) and it's confusing trying to figure out what might be causing the sluggishness. Asus advised me to enable DMA for my 2 HD's (Device Manager shows only my CD-RW's DMA enabled). SiS has a system check which advised I download the following driver updates: AGP (Gart) Driver v1.17E and IDE Driver v2.04. Since I'm not sure what these are for I'm a bit concerned about installing them. Can someone help me out and let me know if enabling DMA for the HD's and updating these drivers might help speed up my system. I want to make sure I don't do anything which ends up making it worse. Thanks in advance for any advice.
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Should I update these drivers? 1
- Thread starter mercie
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DragonQ0105
Technical User
Yes install them.
They are Motherboard Driver - they improve your IDE (Hard Drive Connection to your Motherboard and therefore CPU and Memory) Interface, and your AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) Interface, which improves Graphics Card performance.
Enabling DMA on all Hard Drives and CD-RW/CD-ROM/DVD-RW/DVD-ROM Drives is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for performance - only turn it off if you're having problems or the Computer is old.
They are Motherboard Driver - they improve your IDE (Hard Drive Connection to your Motherboard and therefore CPU and Memory) Interface, and your AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) Interface, which improves Graphics Card performance.
Enabling DMA on all Hard Drives and CD-RW/CD-ROM/DVD-RW/DVD-ROM Drives is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for performance - only turn it off if you're having problems or the Computer is old.
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- #3
@mercie - Yes, I agree with Dragon on this one, do install them... I know that under XP, sometimes the DMA's get screwed when XP detects 5 faults (thus shutting it down) and it goes down to PIO mode (really slow access), and the only fix was to deinstall the IDE Controller from the Device Manager and have Windows reinstall it (I am not sure if this holds also true to Win98)...
... but for the sluggishness of your OS (in this case W98) I would suggest you get yourself a proggy (like RegCleaner or Registry Healer) run that and have them clean your Registry, then I would suggest running the following progies aswell, Ad-Aware, SpyBot Search & Destroy, HiJackThis!, to clean out any SpyWare that may have gotten into your PC, then do a Viral Scan with an updated AntiVirus proggie, to get rid of other nasties...
another thing to check would be to see what is AUTOSTARTING with Windows, as this can also slow down the system...
Ben
If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer...
... but for the sluggishness of your OS (in this case W98) I would suggest you get yourself a proggy (like RegCleaner or Registry Healer) run that and have them clean your Registry, then I would suggest running the following progies aswell, Ad-Aware, SpyBot Search & Destroy, HiJackThis!, to clean out any SpyWare that may have gotten into your PC, then do a Viral Scan with an updated AntiVirus proggie, to get rid of other nasties...
another thing to check would be to see what is AUTOSTARTING with Windows, as this can also slow down the system...
Ben
If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer...
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