Nero 5.5.9.0 and Intel Application Accelerator

[Wedge Maniac]

I had a problem that I solved and thought I would share this info. I had Nero Express and Intel's Application Accelerator (IAA) installed. Many times I was unable to choose the burn speed for Nero. It would lock in at 4x (the drop-down box grayed out), even though my drive is capable of burning at 48x and my media is capable of as much. It didn't always occur, but most of the time. To "unlock" the drop-down box so that I could choose the burn speed I would close Nero, eject and reinsert the media, then restart Nero again. Presto! My burn speed options are back, but then again, why the hell was it doing this in the first place?

It turns out that uninstalling IAA cured this problem. I'm not educated enough on this matter to provide a technical explanation. It just seems apparent that there is a conflict in having the 2 applications installed together (IAA replaces the native IDE drivers, correct?). I'm not sure if I would call this a Nero bug or an Intel bug. Maybe it's neither or both, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's a good example of how mysterious "bugs" appear. I'm not going to complain because I've got it working again. In this case, I can live without IAA.

[lppnet]

I also encountered a problem with IAA. Although IAA shows that my cdrw drive is set to UDMA mode but the burn time is very slow. I'm able to choose 52x in Nero but it takes me around 5 minutes to burn a cdr. 5 minutes for 52x? So I tried to uninstall the IAA after seeing some post regarding the IAA problems. Then the problem is solved.

[Wayne]

If I may ask: What kind of motherboard/chipset do you guys have?

[CowboySlim]

Robert Bruce Thompson (www.hardwareguys.com), author of PC Hardware in a Nutshell, reports similar performance problems that he observed with Intel Ultra ATA Storage Driver (now part of IAA) on page 775 of the 2nd Edition. He notes the results of his parametric benchmark tests.

Slim

[Wedge Maniac]

I have an Intel (Monterrey) motherboard - 1.3-GHz Pentium 4 (850 chipset family).

[CowboySlim]

Hey, this rings a bell about something that happened to me the other night that I didn't think was significant enough to post when I was writing about related issues earlier in the evening but I'll come back and post the details tomorrow because it's far too late now tonight and I know when it's time to quit when I violate the English composition rule concerning run-on sentences as I am right now at this very instant as I type.

9:50 PST
Good night all,
Slim

[Wayne]

I've got an 850i too and my WD 1000 harddrive doesn't perform quite up to what the guys at Harddrive Review report. My CD-R also seems stuck at 24X but that could be the substandard CMC media I currently have. Maybe this IAA has got to go.

[Wedge Maniac]

I think the CDRW drive performance could be related to the media. I also have the dreaded CMC media that seems to want to burn at about 20-something. I'll check Nero's actual speed tomorrow (registry change) and I'll report back.

If you are having an issue that you think is related to IAA, then uninstall IAA and see if the issue resolves. I'm interested to know.

[Wayne]

I'm game. I'll get Sisoft Sandra installed and have a go at it. Like I said I was expecting better harddrive performance from this bugger. It's supposed to be a real screamer. Also, I did the registry hack for Nero and it's less than impressive. All I see is a small variation in write speed across the disk. Nothing to write home about. Going to do some CD tests too and see what happens. Gimme about 1 day...

[Wayne]

Well here's what I found:

When you uninstall IAA the thing sets your CD-Rom back to PIO mode. And my drive speed suffered as you might expect: (on a 10x CD-RW With a couple 64Mb files on it and 0.11% recoverable errors)

With IAA: 3241 Kb/s

without (PIO mode) 2162 Kb/s

DMA mode back on: 3239 Kb/s

So no real change as long as DMA mode is on.


However my harddrive speed went up dramatically:

IAA installed: 20,213 Kb/s

Uninstalled: 26,043 Kb/s

I'm almost positive my acoustic management is set to off. These figures are significantly below what the guy over at Harddrive Review got. ???

[Wedge Maniac]

What is acoustic management? I have recently bought a WD hard drive too - 80GB 8MB cache.

[Wayne]

Acoustic management is a method whereby the noise of the drive's seek arm is reduced by slowing it down slightly and buffering the stops and starts when it moves. Personally I can't tell hardly any difference because the fans in my system make far more noise than the drive. My whole computer is in a soundproof cabinet with it's own squirrelcage fan which is rather quiet. I saw no difference in performance of my harddrive when I tried turning off or on acoustic management in IAA. I think the whole program is buggy now.


Sorry for taking this thread off topic.

[Wedge Maniac]

By the way, Wayne

For some reason I came back and re-read this post. I haven't gotten to checking out the actual Nero burning speed, still haven't change those 2 registry settings (nor have I burned anything here lately). Actually, to resolve the problem I originally posted about, I didn't unistall IAA. Instead I did a system restore with the one build into XP. I have it running on my C drive only, and it worked (got rid of IAA for me).

But really, the reason I posted was because I just noticed your specs. That's an awesome setup you've got there. Are you happy with the Gainward? I'm really wanting a GF4 Ti 4600 when prices come down a bit more.

[Wayne]

Yeah I like the Gainward It is a TOP quality Nvidia solution called the Golden Sample which means the components are overclockable. For me that just means GREAT stability and along with Nvidia's super reputation for stable drivers is was the best choice for me. It is not the absolutest fastest card on the market but for quality and stability it can't be beat. I've already played Doom III Alpha on it and I'm good to go when that game comes out. Only thing I'm wanting now is a full gig of memory so I can run the big games in memory and have a huge disk cache as well as a small ramdrive for temp files. Later.