I've been over on Ars Technica,where they've an article about tweeking NT (worth a look).

A great article, it's good to find some decent information about this OS, but I've been having problems with one of the tips. Although I have a DMA enabled hard disk (quantum bigfoot, urgh) and motherboard (chaintech 6LTM), and they worked with DMA enabled under 9x, enabling DMA in NT has caused a not inconisderable amount of system instability. Worst effected seems to be the CDROM drive, even if I turn off that DMA channel. Other problems seem to arise from HDD read/writes.

Can anyone shed any light on why this is happening? I've checked all BIOS settings, I'm running workstation with SP5, and I've tried using DMA only on the HDD. The only other thing I can think of that uses DMA is my sound card, unless my ISA SCSI card does.

It's really anoying, because the bench marks I took suggest a major performance improvement from using DMA, not to mention only 4% CPU utilisation.

Any suggestions welcome....

Boy