Dell Dimension Hard Drive Issues

March 1st, 2006 Chris Posted in Uncategorized |

People with Dell Dimensions (esp 3000 series) seem to occasionally have problems with slow hard drive performance. The most common symptom reported seems to be audio and video stuttering or skipping, as well as huge amounts of CPU usage when reading from disk.

The reason is that Windows XP is dropping your hard drive out of Ultra DMA mode (fast) into PIO mode (slow). The reasons for this have to do with failed access attempts (which may or may not be a sign of a drive going bad. But it’s nothing to worry about, because you run scandisk regularly and have all your data backed up, right? RIGHT?)

The easiest solution is to download a little utility from Dell’s site called PUSHDMA2. (search their site or google for it). A quick double click of this utility forces you back up into DMA mode, without a restart. There’s another solution that involves editing registry keys and rebooting, but its not worth elaborating on when the utility is much simpler.

This seems to be a fairly common, though infrequent problem, but it took me a while to dredge up the solution. Here’s hoping that this post hits google and helps some people out.