[OT] Hardware Question

[Brian Ackermann <brian_ackermann@bbros.com>]

Hey all,

I've got a quick hardware question that I think someone can answer for me.
I've got a computer at home that behaves 'badly' when accessing both the
Hard disk and the cdrom.  I believe the HD is attached to the IDE primary,
and the CD is attached to the secondary.

When using both items at the same time, most notably when transferring data
between them(I think everything works just fine if I'm listening to a CD,
and crunching on the HD), I get errors all over the place.

It seems that my HD just spins and spins and spins, and eventually the CD
read buffer (or whatever) fills, and then times out.  Then the disk catches
up, grabs the buffer and flushes it, and then everything works peachy for
another 10 seconds....

As you can see, this makes lengthy installations of anything quite
difficult.

My question is, what can I do to fix this issue?  I had been planning on
going with a full rebuild of the machine, getting a new case, mobo, and
anything else I can't salvage from this guy.

But then I started thinking that maybe if I just bought a PCI IDE
controller, and plugged my devices into that, that my problems may be
resolved for a good deal less money.

Tell me what you think.
Brian