Yep, another Pic of the Week.
On a related note, Windows XP does some really strange things. The other day, I noticed that my system seemed to be running a bit slow, so I ran Norton Antivirus and AdAware to see if there were any virii or spyware lurking in my system. Nope, nothing there. I then ran NBench to check the performance. To my surprise, my primary HDD I/O speed was only 2MB/s! I had a hunch, so I checked the Device Manager and checked the properties for the Primary IDE Channel. Eureka! The Current Transfer Mode: for Device 0 had spontaneously changed from Ultra DMA Mode 5 to PIO. WTF?! Luckily, it was an easy fix – I simply selected DMA if available and restarted.
The truly annoying part of this whole affair is that the same thing happened to my Secondary IDE Channel about a month ago. I was copying a CD to my HD and it took about 15 minutes and my CPU was running at max. So you see, my hunch wasn’t just a lucky guess.
On a more positive note, my Winamp 2.91 suddenly started to display Japanese characters in the playlist window. It never worked before, and I have no idea why it’s working now. Maybe I should switch over to Windiis xxxp…