[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[nate at portents.com]

> With the IDE drives, it took MINUTES to boot WinXP. Minutes. Changing
> widows was really painful - it reminded me of the 80486 machine I bought
> years ago that had the clock set at 4.77 MHz, not 33 MHz... Wow, that was
> slow...

While I have no explanation for why this is, I can say from experience
that Windows 2k/XP seem to set the PATA IDE controller for the hard drive
channel to PIO mode by default.  On almost every x86 system I set up, one
of the first things I do is go to the Management Console and go to the IDE
controller and check the properties for each channel on each controller
(typically two controllers per motherboard, sometimes four, with up to two
devices per channel), and make sure they are all set to DMA.

PIO mode over IDE is simply terrible.  Consumes nearly full CPU doing the
most mundane things.  And I have no idea why Windows still defaults to it
so often.

- Nate