I beat Dell!!

I beat Dell!!

So Teletran2 is a nice little box from Dell that is asked to do more things than it probably should be. But from the beginning one of its three hard drives was always slow. And when I mean slow, I mean brutally slow. I also ran into some other problem regarding some DVD software. In tryin to figure out what was wrong with that piece of software, I found where Windows keeps its setting for using either DMA or PIO for accessing hard drives.

Turns out DMA is fast and PIO is slow. It also turns out that Dell had turned off DMA on parts of my system by default. With a 30 second fix, my drive is back to the normal speed! I may even be happy enough to not be quite to mad at Dell for turning it off in the first place. In any case, Teletran2 is a much happier camper, as am I.

Basically, if you didn't build your own comptuer, it's worth looking around in the BIOS to see what other things have been turned off or disabled!