Nero 7 Resource Hog?

[Andy_P]

I used to use Nero 6 quite happily for data-DVD cloning.

Now using Nero 7 essentials on the same PC, and a simple copy job is taking forever. Very slow read/write and verify cycles (around 1hr 15 mins to copy a reasonably full DVD), and the PC is slowed to a crawl while it's doing it, so I can't even pass the time by surfing the net!

Without going into huge detail of the PC spec (I can if I need to), it's a reasonably competent Pentium 4 with Nero set to use a large audio-only drive (D:) for it's cache image files. It seems to always write an image file irrespective of whether I use a source and target DVD drive, or use the same one for reading and writing.

Can anyone suggest anything to improve this?
Many thanks.

[Ian]

Do you have the "quick copy" box checked? That will make it copy directly from the source drive to the destination without creating an image first.

[Andy_P]

Thanks for the speedy reply, not sure how I could have missed that tickbox!
Just tried it, and performance was back to perfectly acceptable, so it's the caching process that seems to be the problem. I'd still be interested to know why it was being so troublesome if anyone has any ideas I'd still be interested to hear any suggestions. This PC gets used mainly for audio work, so there is a lot of big files and data caching going on and I want to keep it working well.

While I'm here, does anyone know if there is a way to verify a copy that has just been burnt when you've forgotten to tick the box before you started! (Or a way to get the verify box to stay ticked by default?)

[Ian]

Check your IDE settings in Device Manager. Often, high resource problems are caused by DMA being disabled. Even if its enabled for your drives, it could be disabled on the HDD its caching to.

[oslik3]

Also, try running hard disk drfragmentation utility once in a while.
If you are constatntly creating/deleting/editing large files, you disk can become defragmented sooner..

[Andy_P]

Doing a defrag as we speak....Thanks

Interesting about the DMA settings -
In Device Manager / IDE Controllers / Primary IDE Controller / Properties / Advanced Properties, "Device 0" (which is partitioned to be the C and D drives) is set to "use DMA if available" but in the "current transfer mode" box it says it is currently using POI mode.
Device 1 (a second hard drive) and both channels of the Secondary IDE controller (the CD-drives?) are all using "Ultra DMA mode 2"

For info, both physical drives are currently formatted to FAT32, and I have used Norton Partition magic in the past to increase the size of the C partition relative to the D.

Any ideas why the main drive isn't using DMA and how/where I could change it?

Many thanks for your help so far.

[Ian]

Check to see if its set correctly in the BIOS. If it is, the easiest way I've found to fix it in Windows is to go into Device Manager and remove the IDE controller. When you reboot, the OS should redetect it and hopefully have the DMA set correctly.