Acer Netbook Woes

I got some dandy acer netbooks for work about a year or half back. They all developed some performance issues. Audio playback was affected most, and choppy almost all of the time.

Image: Wikipedia [link]

Initially I thought it was a driver issue but turns out it is the hard-drive. Normally, a windows pc/laptop hard-drive runs in DMA mode (which is pretty fast). When the system encounters a catastrophic failure (e.g. BSOD), it put the HD's in PIO mode (archaic and slow yet effective in retrieving data under horrid conditions).

Fix - put it back into DMA mode. A simple script is here [link].

What causes it?
Some suggest the right speaker is sitting too close to the HD. When loud enough, it disrupts the HD causing cyclic errors. Once say 6 errors have been recorded, Windows XP reverts the HD to PIO mode.