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Hello again and sorry for the delay.

IRQ and DMAs are commonly referred as “interruptions” and they’re the ‘bridge’ used by the operating system and software to directly ‘speak’ to hardware components installed in your PC.

For example, you may have a super fast DVD unit or Hard Drive, but if DMA is not activated -by these days that’s activated by default- you’ll never get the maximum performance from those devices because instead ‘talking’ directly to them, OS must use a walkaround thus making the whole process really slow. DMA stands for Direct Memory Address.

I tell you a little story to graphic this:
Some days ago I finally setted up my sister computer and until I finally managed to activate DMA support for the DVD recorder, uploading data to its HD was a painfull process. Every DVD took about 30 minutes or more (damn!!) to dump it’s data -pictures, music, videos- to the hard disk. When I finally managed to activate DMA support it took no more than 10 -often less- minutes to copy all the files. As you see, having a well tweaked PC really makes the difference.

For more info just check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_memory_access and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRQ

Best!