I don’t know if any of you had this kind of problem, it surely annoy the hell out of me.

Symptom :

• Everytime you use your DVD/CD the CPU usage shoot up close to 90.
• Your CD/DVD burning session is longer than it should be.
• The CD/DVD drive lights keep flashing like morse code signal

Usually this is caused by your CD/DVD drive is using PIO mode instead of DMA. Under normal circumstances, you can easily instruct Windows to use DMA when accessing CD/DVD drive whenever possible, but in rare cases windows will still use PIO mode even though you’ve changed the setting.

The cause

This is caused by Windows permanently disable DMA mode for your CD/DVD driver after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations (usually caused by reading bad CDs), and this has been pointed out in Microsoft WHDC page
Windows will automatically disable DMA mode for the particular CD/DVD drive permanently, because it believe that you hardware is failing, but this is not usually the case.

The Fix

You can easily fix that by deleting the affected IDE Channel in Windows Device Manager. To access it, right click on My Computer, choose properties, choose Hardware, click on Hardware Manager.

Then delete the Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel, reboot your pc. Windows will reinstall the Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel driver back after that.
And If everything turns out allright, you should be able to change your CD/DVD drive setting back to DMA mode in no time.

[tags]cdrom, dvd, dma, ide, cd burner, dvd burner, hardware,guides,tips,howto[/tags]

Fans of DOS games? Do you know where to get your favorite classics? Here’s the list of website that offers free download of classic DOS games a.k.a ‘abandonware’, in no particular order :

• xtcabandonware.com
  
• abandonia.com
• liberatedgames.org
• www.remaininplay.com
• www.abandonwarespot.com
• www.abandonwarering.com

Please refer to my previous post on how to play these DOS games on Microsoft Windows XP

[tags]dos,games,abandonware,free,emulator[/tags]

Maybe some of you wonders how to play classic DOS games in Windows XP, since newer operating system can’t play old DOS games anymore.

Now, here’s a howto that teaches you how to play your old DOS games back in your Windows XP machine. This tutorial assume that you have a DOS game ready in hand named M1 Tank Platoon.

Download DOSBox

Download DOSBox from DOSBox website.

Install DOSBox

Install DOSBox, of course.

Prepare your DOS games

Copy your DOS game folder at C: drive for easy access.

Start DOSBox

Start DOSBox and mount C drive

Start the DOS game

Change directory to the DOS game dir.

Execute the DOS game binary

Congratulations!

And watch the DOS game flies in your computer, you can change it to full screen by pressing ALT+ key.

If the game run too fast or too slow, you can change the speed by editing the dosbox.conf file (available in the Start Menu). The setting you need to change is “cycles=3000″, adjust the number to suit your DOS games.

Happy gaming!

p/s: bookmark or digg this website if you find it useful!

[tags]dos,games,abandonware,old games,dosbox,windows,emulator[/tags]