Enable Hard Drive DMA

Direct memory access (DMA) gives your hard drive the ability to read information from memory without using the CPU. This can help speed up tasks that are disk intensive, such as accessing databases.

If the check box is grayed out, your motherboard chipset doesn't support the busmaster interface. If you have problems booting, reboot in safe mode and turn off DMA.

To activate DMA in Windows 2000:

Right-click My Computer and select Properties.
Click on the Hardware tab, then select Device Manager.
Click on IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.
Right-click an IDE channel and select Properties (your hard drive is probably on the primary IDE channel).
Select the Advanced Settings tab.
For Device 0 and Device 1 under Transfer Mode, select "DMA if available." Click OK.
Click OK and restart Windows.

In some cases, you do not want to have DMA turned on if you are using an extremely old hard drive or if you're using a CD-R or CD-RW drive. You want to stick with the PIO mode 4 or the default setting. DMA can cause data buffer problems when used in conjunction with a CD-RW or CD-R.