Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic :: Re: What can cause a huge hit on my CPU?

[quote name="Fullofkittens"][quote name="Entropy Stew"]First thing to check - do you have a virus or spyware? Norton, Adaware, Spybot, blah lah etc. Second thing - make sure windows didn't lose its mind and disable DMA on your disk drives. 1. Jump into the device manager 2. Open the properties page for IDE ATAPI Drives->Primary IDE Channel. Also check secondary 3. Head to the Advanced Settings tab 4. Transfer mode should be "DMA is Available" and current transfer mode should be "Ultra DMA Mode" or "Not Applicable" if there's nothing attached to that IDE port. If there is any mention of PIO mode, your cpu is being raped every time you access the disk. Windows 2000 is especially bad about dropping disks down to PIO mode silently. -/ES/-[/quote] Okay, on the primary channel, it was already set to DMA. On the secondary, they were set to PIOS, which I switched back to DMA if available... and it switched Device 0 to Ultra DMA Mode 2 but Device 1 stayed on PIO Mode. I guess DMA isn't available? Is the secondary IDE channel even important if I only have two hard drives (on the same strip)? Question #2 is, does it make any difference if the system drive is NTFS and the second drive is FAT32? I need to clear some shit out so I can defrag these drives, I guess that's the next step. [/quote]