When using Nero to backup a DVD of home movies, a message appears saying: ‘Nero has detected that your drive is not in DMA mode. To improve your system performance, we suggest you enable DMA for all drives’. The computer is running Windows XP, and I was under the impression DMA is turned-on by default in Windows XP? I cannot find any option for enabling DMA when I look at the Properties for the DVD+/-RW drive.

Windows XP should enable DMA mode by default for devices which properly support DMA. The reason you cannot find DMA on the Properties for your DVD drive is because the DMA setting is for the IDE controller. To check whether DMA is enabled on the IDE channel to which the DVD drive is connected, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘System’ control panel (you may need to click ‘Performance and Maintenance’ if the Control Panel is displayed in Category view). Click the ‘Hardware’ tab and the ‘Device Manager’ button. Expand ‘IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers’ and right-click on the channel to which the device is connected and select ‘Properties’. If you don’t know to which channel the DVD drive is connected, you will need to find out. This information is usually displayed during the power-on self-test (POST) when your computer boots and can also be viewed in the system BIOS setup screen.

Once you have opened the channel properties, click the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab. For the DVD device, select ‘DMA if available’ as the Transfer Mode. Click OK. According to Microsoft, in the event that more than six DMA data transfer errors occur, Windows will default the device back to PIO mode and you will not be able to change the setting back to DMA. In this case, you will need to reinstall the device in order to change the setting to DMA. However, this isn’t advisable since the whole reason DMA would be disabled is due to the device not supporting the DMA transfer mode. For more information, see: www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx.