Recently I called Dell Tech Support for help about DMA in Windows 2000. I knew it'd be a waste of time as in the past, but decided to try anyway. After waiting on hold for about 40 minutes, I got some women who either had a severe case of some throat/lung disease or had such a terrible accent that that's what it seemed like.
After explaining my problem to her, I had to explain what DMA is (to a "professional" tech support person). After that she finally claimed to understand my problem and told me to hold on. She came back on about 5 minutes later and told me to go device manager, blah blah blah, stuff I've already done myself thank you very much. Although she didn't seem to even know WHERE DMA is enabled. She told me to try to enable it under the hard drive's properties, where in reality it's enabled under the Primary/Secondary IDE Controller properties. Then she told me to hold on again while she "looks into the problem". About 10 minutes later I just hung up.
I decided to send an email to Dell's tech support. This is what I sent them:
quote:
My Windows 2000 just cannot enable DMA mode for the hard drive. I recently wiped my hard drive clean, repartitioned it, and re-installed
both Windows 2000 and Windows XP on it. Right away in Windows 2000 I noticed major problems with video playing and editing, while it was fine in XP. I realized the reason was that Windows 2000 did not have DMA mode enabled for the hard drive.
I've heard that Windows 2000 sometimes had problems with DMA but I've never had problems with it on this computer nor on any other of my
computers. I know the hard drive supports DMA because a)I've had it working flawlessly on Windows 2000 on this computer before, and b)because it's working fine right now in XP. Please do not suggest to install a Win2000 service pack. That is also not the problem. On all my computers, including this one, I have NEVER EVER used ANY service packs and everything was perfectly fine before. So I know the solution lies somewhere else.
I tried going to the Device Manager, under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, under Primary IDE Channel, to the Advanced Settings tab, under Device0 (which is the hard drive). For Transfer Mode it says to use "DMA if available". However for Current Transfer Mode it says it's using PIO Mode. Meanwhile, everything is fine in Windows XP: it's using DMA Mode. I tried setting
it to USE PIO and back to USE DMA but it didn't help. I also re-installed Windows 2000 several times AGAIN but it was just the same.
Any help with this would really be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Three days later I got this response:
quote:
Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Support.
I am recommending a knowledgebase article that addresses the issue that you have. Please visit the following link to access the article that I
wish to forward to you:
http://www.ati.com/support/faq/win2k/win2kconfigenabledma.html
This article should not only give you a walk through the process of recommended troubleshooting, but also give a brief discussion
on the causal aspect of this issue.
We assure you of our best services at all times.
Thank you for choosing Dell.
WOW. As far as I can tell, all the person who got my email did was go to google and type in "Windows 2000 + DMA" or something along those lines. Not only have I already been to that website myself lots of time, but the website just plain sucks!
Thanks a lot Dell!
By the way, if someone could help me with that problem, I'd really appreciate it too.
[ September 15, 2003: Message edited by: xeen ]
