Mark wrote:
> One of the things that plagued me (not a major issue, but a real
> annoyance), was that whenever I minimized Mozilla, and tried to restore
> a previously minimized app, I had a 4 or 5 second delay. The system
> worked well otherwise, and was solid as a rock, but that really annoyed
> me. I am running Windows 2000 on a K6-450 with 256MB RAM, and a 32MB ATI
> All-in-Wonder Pro AGP. Not a state of the art CPU, but the machine's
> really no slouch either. In any case, I started wondering . . the HD's
> in this box have always been running in PIO mode with the default WIN2K
> IDE drivers. So, finally tonight, I gave the latest VIA 4.32 drivers a
> shot, and installed the IDE busmaster driver. For starters, the system
> loads Windows in about one third the time - really! And, no more lag
> time, when minimizing Mozilla and switching between applications.
> I'm posting this here, because Mozilla was really the only application
> that exhibited this symptom on my box. I never really considered it
> sluggish before (though I know it was now), but this made a dramatic
> difference in Mozilla performance as far as I'm concerned. So, if you're
> system has a VIA chipset, and you do NOT have UDMA enabled, this
> definitely affects Mozilla performance even if you see no issues
> otherwise with the system.
> FWIW, my motherboard is a Soyo-5EHM with the ETEQ (same as VIA) chipset.
>
> Mark
Since UDMA does nothing to hurt performance or stability in any way,
there is really no reason to NOT install busmastering drivers that
support it anyhow.
