At 09:22 PM 3/19/98 -0500, you wrote:

>The builder slaved the CD-ROM drive to the hard drive, with both on the
>primary IDE port on the MOBO. Besides the fact that this will make it
>difficult to add another drive at a later time, my understanding is that
>doing it this way will compromise the performance of the HD. Something
>about the IDE port being no faster than the slowest device attached to it,
>which in this case is the CD-ROM drive.
>
Since the IDE controller can only access one device at a time (except in the
newest machines) I don't see how the performance of the hard drive would be
affected directly. Still, it's probably better to use the secondary IDE
channel.

>I've checked the manual for the MOBO (a Biostar with an Award BIOS {I know-
>an inexpensive MOBO}), and I see in the CMOS setup that the secondary can
>be enabled, and I think that it indicates that it will be set IRQ 15, but
>I'm not entirely sure on this one. Anybody know?
>
Right-click on "My Computer," select "Properties" and click on the device
manager
tab. Double click "Computer" on the device manager display and you'll get a
listing
of which devices use which IRQ's.  Secondary IDE controllers should be set to
IRQ 15 by default, and usually the driver takes care of this.

>The next question: if I manage to enable the port and get the IRQ set
>correctly, do I need to remove the current CD-ROM from Win95 and let it
>(hopefully) be redetected in the right location on bootup?
>
No.

>A last question on another subject- opening and then closing certain
>windows tends to leave little flyspecks on the desktop. The worst offender
>is the box that pops up when you right click anywhere on the desktop. Close
>that, and it leaves these three little specks behind. You get the same
>effect any number of times by opening and closing that box. Opening other
>windows over those spots removes them when the window is closed. I assume
>that this has something to do with the video card (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000
>w/4meg) or the way the processor handles the video (AMD K-6 233mhz). This
>is mostly an annoyance, but any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
Sounds like defective or slow video RAM to me.  I had the same problem with a
Matrox Mystique (aka the Matrox Mistake) and finally dumped the card for an
ATI
3D Xpression+.  No problems since then.

Ray Reyes



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