I cant find any mention of DMA anywhere in the device manager or the drive's properties.

My bad. That setting is actually under the "Advanced" tab on the IDE controllers. Whichever IDE channel your DVD is on (assuming it is IDE) should show DMA or UltraDMA. If not, you may have some BIOS/CMOS tweaking or other tweaking to do. That's where I'd start, anyhow.