Not along the usual fare for this site, but a tidbit I thought I'd pass along anyway, as it just helped me while trying to figure out why my windows machine was a bit slow. I noticed that my hard drive controller was in PIO mode, and after a bit of research, found that this was the reason. Ok, fine, how to go about solving it? This post helped out. All you have to do is go into the registry via regedit, edit a key, set your controller to PIO mode and then back to DMA if available, and you're golden. The solution is the post by Aeolus, titled "Another Solution".