Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic :: Re: What can cause a huge hit on my CPU?

[quote name="Maxime Faget"][quote name="Fullofkittens"]Okay, on the primary channel, it was already set to DMA. On the secondary, they were set to PIOS, which I switched back to DMA if available... and it switched Device 0 to Ultra DMA Mode 2 but Device 1 stayed on PIO Mode. I guess DMA isn't available? Is the secondary IDE channel even important if I only have two hard drives (on the same strip)?[/quote] You probably have a CD-ROM connected to Device 2. Some of these don't support UDMA. As long as DMA is enabled on all your hard disks and DVD drives you should be fine. Note that you shouldn't mix drive types on the same channel. For example, if you have two hard disks, both should be connected to the primary controller. [quote]Question #2 is, does it make any difference if the system drive is NTFS and the second drive is FAT32?[/quote] No, UDMA is a hardware feature. If the IDE driver for your operating system supports it, it will work with any file system. Something to try: right click the taskbar and select Task Manager. Click the Processes tab, and click the heading on the CPU column. This will rearrange the listing according to CPU usage. (If all you see is zeros, it may be ordered in reverse, so click it again. System Idle Process will usually be at the top.) Now do some things that you know will peg your CPU and see if any particular process repeatedly rises to the top.[/quote]