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How to change spindown time in CD-Rom drive?

I'm testing my niece's new computer, and its CD-Rom drive spins down too quickly - only after half a minute of inacitivity. One then has to wait for about 5 seconds for it to 'spin up' again when one wants to, say, move forward in a game, which is irritating in the long run.

The drive's documentation doesn't say anything about the topic. I've successfully used a program called Spindown on my own computer, but it doesn't seem to work on my niece's.

The CD-Rom drive is Creative's 24-speed IDE drive, connected to the secondary IDE controller.

TIA,
Vesa

stevespencer

If this is a newish machine and your running w95 then switch off the power management in the controll panel, you may also have to do it in the bios.

good luck

Stephen.

raives

ASKER

I've done it in Ctrl Panel, no luck. I'll check the bios. But isn't this a 'feature' of the CD-Rom drive? I've heard many new CD Rom drives suffer from this annoyance.

Vesa

raives

ASKER

The power management settings have no effect on the drive's spindown. I have heard about a 'switch' to be added to some statement in autoexec.bat or config.sys - does anyone have info on this?

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raives

ASKER

Could you tell me the setting you use for your Toshiba drive? And where is this command given?

I have Toshiba's 8x drive in my _own_ computer, and I'd like to adjust its spindown time without using a separate program - Spindown - for that purpose.

(IMO it is a stupid thing to build theoretically very fast CD-Rom drives that in actual use are slower than lower-spec models that do not spin down.)

i just add a /S:seconds after the .sys file in config.sys (NB: this isnt the original Toshiba driver, this is something i picked up from a noname laptop)

raives

ASKER

It didn't work for me - after putting that in config.sys and rebooting I got the error message

"Device driver not found: 'MSCD000' - No valid CDRom device driver installed"

Luckily, Spindown is a convenient enough program... Thanks for trying to help,

Vesa