Down to a crawl

Q.

Lately, I've noticed that my system becomes very stow while copying files from my DVD drive onto the hard drive. I have tried using a different DVD drive and have formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP as well, but all is in vain and file copy operations are still time-consuming. My computer has a Core 2 Duo E7200 processor with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an Nvidia 9600 GT graphics card.

A.

There can be several reasons for slow file copy operations. If you haven't defragmented your hard drive in a long while, chances are that file fragmentation on your hard drive is causing system wide slowdowns. In Windows XP, click Start > Accessories > System Tools and run the Disk Defragmented all your drives. Next, check if DMA is enabled on all DMA-capable devices (such as DVD drives and IDE drives) on your system. In Windows XP, right click 'My Computer', select 'Properties'. Next, click the 'Hardware' tab, followed by 'Device Manager'. Expand 'IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers', double-click 'Primary IDE Channel' (you may have more than one) and select the 'Advanced > Settings' tab. In the 'Transfer Mode' box, ensure the 'DMA if available' option is selected. If you see 'PIO Only', then you need to change this to 'DMA if available'. Restart your computer once you're done. Additionally, you may want to run a disk check to check your hard drive for bad sectors.

Nevertheless, if you wish to give this approach a try, have a look at JimmyR's video tutorial (www.youtube.com/watch?v= PqXiKYG3J7M&feature=related) using the free Audacity sound editor (audacity.sourceforge.net/download/windo ws). If you want to use a commercial application, try out Music Morpher Gold. Once you have this installed, follow the free tutorial for removing vocals (www.musicmorpher.com/ free-tutorials/voice-remover.htm) and extracting the vocals to a separate file (www.musicmorpher.com/free-tutorials/voice-extractor.htm).