November 03, 2006

Technology- The Web is Awesome!

I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on how cool the web is. Yesterday I posted about the strange behavior I've seen on my laptop. This morning Eli wrote to point out that the symptoms appeared to be a disk-drive where DMA wasn't working. He included a link to a Microsoft article which shows how to tell if DMA is working correctly. Sure enough my interface was configured to try to use DMA but for some reason it was in PIO (non-DMA) mode. Having determined the cause of the problem it wasn't too hard to find some more detailed instructions on how to fix it. I made deleted a few registry keys to force the computer to redetect DMA mode, rebooted, and its now working perfectly playing glitchless audio and video and overall performing much much much better.

Eli also included a link to his blog Shouting Distance which is mostly focued on debugging. It seems like a great resource for some of these sticky issues I've discussed in the past few posts.

All in all I wish I'd posted about this much sooner- I've been suffering with this for months and now the problem is not only solved but its documented (somewhat) to hopefully help the next person who encounters a similar problem. How cool is that?

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