Aspire one sound quality choppy, Hard drive slow
My computer runs XP. Short explanation- uninstall your primary IDE cable and reboot. Long explanation.First go to device manager which can be reached by right clicking on the My Computer icon and clicking properties OR Start>Settings>Control Panel>System. Once open click on the Hardware tab, then Device Manager Button. The next window shows a tree. Look for “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers” and click on the ”
+” next to it. That will open a sub list one of which will read “Primary IDE Channel.” Right click it and select Properties. New Window will open, click on Advanced Settings Tab” Under “Device 0″ the last line will read “Current Transfer Mode:” with a text field next to it. If it reads “PIO Only” in the text field you have the problem I did. If it reads “Ultra DMA Mode 5″ or anything involving DMA, this might not be your issue but this technique might still help.
Sorry I don’t know why it posted that comment before I finished it. IF the line reads PIO Only, that is what you want to change and the “easiest” way is to let the computer do it for you. Click Cancel on the “Primary IDE Channel Properties” window and you should now be at the “Device Manager” window. Right click on “Primary IDE Channel and click “Uninstall.” It will pop up a “Warning” in a windows titled “Confirm Device Removal” Click OK. Now Restart your computer. I held the power button until it turned off but a Restart should work as well, I just didn’t want to repeat the process because this method is making Windows listen to you. You will have to reboot twice and they will take FOREVER. Explanation. Your computer is fine it’s Windows causing the issue. For some reason it hit what it thinks to be errors when reading your drive so it changes to a mode with less errors but doesn’t distribute processing loads so the processor has to do more thinking. So instead of your motherboard army doing all your tasks it only wants the General to do the work. That’s what PIO mode is. This method makes windows “forget” that the drive even existed. However because windows is not the first thing to load on your computer, it will still load. At which point windows sees the drive it is installed on says” oh hey something new, let me install things so I can read it”. Which is why it takes forever, and when it’s done the first time it will ask for another reboot. Give it another reboot and this time I did just Start Menu>Restart. Hopefully this helps people out without having to revert to previous or wiping their drives clean. However mine still was a bit sluggish and so my next comment will be what I did next.
When I followed the above the reboot was fast and the computer ran at leat ten times faster again on hard drive access. Now maybe I can watch Youtube and listen to sound again.