Ian wrote:
> in the end I wrote a simple program myself (attached).
Almost exactly parallels one I wrote myself for the same purpose
some months back <g>
For those who are not aware, if you have ATA (=Ultra-DMA-33)
capable controllers and drives, NT does NOT turn on ATA support
by default. However, an MS utility called DMACHECK.EXE will
do this, provided you have either SP4+, or a hotfix to SP3 called
ata-fixi.exe. SP3 itself won't support UDMA-33. Hunt the MS site
for these terms/filenames and you'll come up with 'em
Anyway, DMACheck will tell you the current "detect UDMA33"
setting, and allow you to turn it ON if you want. There are dire
warnings about how it might not work if you don't have UDMA33-
capable hardware, but in all cases I've tried it, it behaved
(including a case where I *didn't* have the right kind of drive).
And the resulting disk speedup was 20% on average. My drives
are typically writing at 5-6MB/s these days, compared to 3-4
beforehand.
Oh, and defragging is *definitely* also a good thing, as Ian says.
Look for diskkeeper-lite (freeware) and use it.
cheers,
peter
============================================
Peter Hyde, SPIS Ltd, Christchurch, New Zealand
* TurboNote: http://TurboPress.com/tbnote.htm
-- small, FREE and very handy
* Print-to-Web automation http://TurboPress.com
* Web design, automation and hosting specialists
Find all the above and MORE at http://www.spis.co.nz
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Zealand Delphi Users group - Offtopic List - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz
