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[stuart_tetley]

I don't know when this started, but MC9 is taking an eternity to load up these days...

The splash screen comes up reasonably fast, but then it spends nearly a minute, during which both hard drives are accessing heavily (I have all my music on a second drive.)  About 40 seconds into this, the various bits of the MC interface appear one by one, until after about a minute, it's all there.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

MC9.1.269 registered
Win2K, 512Mb Ram, 1.1GHz P3

[escaflo]

Is your hdd still running in DMA mode?

Windows have this nasty habit of turning off hdd DMA mode and switch it to PIO mode which results in a very nasty slow down.

Take a look under your device manager.

[Uwe]

I had the same Problem some Releases ago(sounds like 100 years ago, but I think it was last week). MC took also a lot of virtuell Memory. Completely uninstalling and reinstalling MC worked for me. Try it!

Uwe

[jleerigby]

Is your hdd still running in DMA mode?

Windows have this nasty habit of turning off hdd DMA mode and switch it to PIO mode which results in a very nasty slow down.

Take a look under your device manager.

This is a possibility.  If you find that escaflo is right turn DMA back on for the drive and keep a close eye on it.  Windows will turn it off again after 6 more read errors are encountered when trying to read the drive.  If you are running XP you can check the system error log to see if it has been getting read errors.  If it has you'll need to investigate - BIOS settings, IDE Cable etc, etc.

[stuart_tetley]

Well, I found the secondary drive was running in PIO mode.  I'm running Windows 2000, which has similar (identical?) event logging facilities as XP.  I couldn't find any evidence of read errors.

After changing it to DMA and rebooting, it remained on DMA.  However, the load time was now even longer - close to a minute and a half!

So I tried Uwe's advice of removing and reinstalling MC (first copying out my data folder.)  Even after copying my data back in, it loads in under 2 seconds.

Thanks for the help!  

[Matt]

But why is this happening?  If anyone can figure it out, please let us know. (the slow loading that is)

We're stumped...

[matshif]

I have reported this under the top thread.

What's the DMA and PIO mode and how do you get back to DMA, which seems to be the best one.

Please, it would be nice to have it in step by step.

/Mats

[jleerigby]

Right click My Computer> Properties> Hardware> Device Manager.
Expand the selection for IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.  Double click the Primary IDE channel.  IDE0 is your master drive and IDE1 is the slave.  Transfer mode should be 'DMA if available'.  

I think that the actual DMA mode achieved is based on whether your drive is ATA33, 66, 100 or 133.  ATA100 = DMA mode 5.  DMA mode also requires you to have the correct type of IDE cable and appropriate BIOS settings.  The last time I had the problem of the drive constantly dipping into PIO it was because of some obscure BIOS setting (well it was obscure to me) that was wrong.  I think it was APIC (not ACPI) and I had it enabled when it should have been disabled for an Athlon CPU (enabled for Pentium).

WARNING - I'm no expert so don't play around with your BIOS on account of what I've said unless you really know what you are doing or have checked your mobo manual.  MS knowledge base have quite a lot of info on drives dipping into PIO.

[Edit - I had APIC & ACPI the wrong way round.  I've now corrected the above.  ACPI will be enabled if you ae using XP.  Disable APIC if using an AMD processor.]

[matshif]

Thanks JLee

When I expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers I found one Primary IDE channel and one Secondary. In the first the DMA was set both in IDE0 and IDE1 but in the Secondary the IDE0 had PIO selected and I changed it. Still the box under has something about PIO. I can't translate it. Hope you see what I mean.

After that I made some delete from MC Libarary. The only things I have imported since this slow load started are approx 2 GB video clips and those were deleted.

After that I rebooted and imported the video files and now I have an acceptable loadtime around 6 sec.

/Mats  

[Marko]

I had some large (6 - 700 meg) mpg files imported. MC was having a real tough time doing thumbnails for them, hung for what seemed an eternity, then no thumbnails. When trying to play them, that took forever too, but eventually the did start playing, trying to seek, say 30 minutes into the file was out the question though. I removed these offending mpg's from the library and normal service resumed.

[jleerigby]

Thanks JLee

When I expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers I found one Primary IDE channel and one Secondary. In the first the DMA was set both in IDE0 and IDE1 but in the Secondary the IDE0 had PIO selected and I changed it. Still the box under has something about PIO. I can't translate it. Hope you see what I mean.

After that I made some delete from MC Libarary. The only things I have imported since this slow load started are approx 2 GB video clips and those were deleted.

After that I rebooted and imported the video files and now I have an acceptable loadtime around 6 sec.

/Mats  

Don't worry about secondary IDE showing PIO.  That'll be your CD-ROM.  Many CD-Roms work in PIO only.  Newer models often work in DMA mode 2.  I managed to get one thats DMA mode 4.  It's not an issue for your CD-ROM.

[matshif]

Thanks JLee

Well, I was to positive about the loadtime. It's more or less 10 sec. It's OK with me.

/Mats

[JimH]

It might take a lot of time to build thumbnails if the drive was a network drive, not a local drive.