Hardware interrupts spiking

Originally posted by esegura I was wondering what do you consider to be "high" when you talk about Context switches. ... Looking forward to see your numbers

thank you everone who contributed to this post, i just reinstalled my ide driver and the comp is back up and running at full speed, having been crippled by 100% cpu. thank god i found this thread before reinstalling everything!! thanks again

Originally posted by namrehto One possibility is that CRC/timeout events occurred far enough in the past to have scrolled off the event log. Or the IDE could simply have been misconfigured in the first place. The thing to do now is to watch its behaviour (and the event log) to see if and how the problem recurs.

Yep, that's one possibility that I always try to be wary of. I have set a ridiculously high maximum size for all the event logs, and since this is a new system, the logs aren't anywhere near full - so the errors having dropped off the log is probably impossible, unless Windows has decided to randomly eat the logs. A full search and manual browse of the logs doesn't show any errors with a cdrom source. It could be that I'm not searching with the right terms, though, or looking for the right thing. They should have Cdrom as the source in any case, right? I can't find anything that has that source in the system log, starting from the date this system was built.

You know, I think you might have hit the nail on the head - maybe it was misconfigured to begin with. I haven't used it *that* much. It's odd that I haven't noticed it being slow or anything, though, if it was in PIO mode all the time. Maybe it's still fast enough to not feel slow. Then again, compared to fully formatting a 300 gig HD, which takes over an hour here, pretty much anything feels fast. :D But I will keep a very close eye on it from now on. Process Explorer, and this forum, is priceless for exactly this kind of thing. :)

Originally posted by Buggy Buddha That does leave me to wonder what caused it to revert to PIO mode in the first place, though.

Quoting myself, but I've been trying to find the reason the DVD-drive went to PIO. I found this MS article that may be useful to others, as well: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

The most interesting thing I read there is this:

Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device. -- All CRC and timeout errors are logged in the system event log. These types of errors could be caused by improper mounting or improper cabling (for example, 40-pin instead of 80-pin cable). Or such errors could indicate imminent hardware failure, for example, in a hard drive or chipset.

So, any errors that cause Windows to revert to PIO mode should be logged in the system event log. My event log absolutely does not have any such log entries. So are we to assume that Windows did not switch PIO mode on because of errors, but something else happened instead?

My Hardware Interrupts are also showing at 50% but I do not think it's the DVD drive.I only have a Samsung CD writer/DVD reader and the IDE controllers are showing 'DMA if available'

Go easy on me as I hope I have understood the above but if I haven't please let me know.