February 05, 2005

Crouching Kitty, Hidden Bear



I ferociously quested and contributed to the betterment of the land to finally reach level 30, where I got my 5th form, Travel Cat. It can travel over open spaces at 140% of normal walk speed, which is a great blessing since most quests require traveling very long distances on foot.

DVD: Today my DVD writer slowed down like hell with 1 hour per DVD at 8x. Why? Coz XP turned the DVDRW drive's DMA off. After a few DVDs I finally got pissed and googled around a bit. I found an article that solved the problem and explained why it happens. In short, when XP gets sick of receiving errors trying to read scratched/erroneous CD/DVDs, it tells the system to fall back to PIO. The solution, though a bit barbaric, is to delete some registry values that were written due to the errors. After rebooting, I was burning DVDs again at less than 10 mins :D

fururut note: imagine the losses incurred by turning off DMA, 10 mins became 1hr. That's not to mention that PIO hogs a lot of resources so everything slowed down to a crawl.

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