optical drives make whole computer hiccup

[scottrussell]

hi heres my issue:

i have two lite on drives, the primary is a dvd-rom drive, and my second is a dvd-/+rw. if i have cd-rs or dvd-rs in the drives and i try to copy the files to my harddrive, read info off them, or even just use them run a computer game, it makes the rest of my system act sluggish and hiccup. i have 1gb of ram, and pentium 4 2.0ghz. a friend told me i had something set wrong in device manager..but i couldnt remember what he said. does anyone know what my problem is? thanks.

[TwoRails]

He could be referring to the Transfer Mode. Go into the Device Manager, go to IDE controllers, open each up, go to Advanced Settings and make sure you opticals are set at DMA 2 and not PIO.