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| Thread ID: 13987 | 2001-12-25 07:32:00 | What is DMA for? | Guest (0) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 28532 | 2001-12-25 07:32:00 | Geez I'm full... Right, well the fat man in the red suit brought The Girl her Sims program and I had a hell of a job getting the darn thing installed under extreme pressure this morning before the chook could go in the oven. It only obliged after I had upgraded the DirectX to version 7 and disabled the DMA of the CD-ROM. What does the DMA do? I'm a bit worried about putting the tick back in again in case it causes the silly Sims game to crash. Thank you!! |
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| 28533 | 2001-12-25 08:05:00 | DMA (direct memory access) allows devices to access the memory without going through the CPU and using it's power to do such a simple job. If DMA is available it should be used to preserve CPU processing power for other hungry tasks. | Guest (0) | ||
| 28534 | 2001-12-25 08:32:00 | How was the stuffing? | Guest (0) | ||
| 28535 | 2001-12-25 14:14:00 | ...DMA's, huh (?) Many tetra Gigabytes have been written about whether or not to enable this on one's own system. The evidence - either way - is staggering. The following URL might be worthwhile checking out if you have a spare afternoon ... links to various Newsletters from 'Fred Langa' which address the topic in good detail. After several years of trying 'both' on Win98SE - i am yet to arrive at an opinion. Pass!!! e_ search.atomz.com |
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| 28536 | 2001-12-27 01:59:00 | DMA is used for the floppy drive. That was done because the 8088 was VERY slow, and a 500kHz DMA channel was fast by comparison. When hard drives became affordable, the DMA was too slow for them, so people went to PIO 'programmed I/O'. Your installation may have failed because the DMA was slow. Installation routines can be a bit funny, and have strange failure modes. Because a CD is still a slow device, you should probably reenable DMA for it. Is Sim crashes, turn it off. Whatever works -- who believes that PCs are deterministic engines? |
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| 28537 | 2001-12-27 09:50:00 | Thanks Graham, that's easy enough to follow. The tick is back in and so far so good (touchwood). Now, where can I get one of those ejector seats to prise The Girl's bottom off after a certain amount of use each day.... |
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