Abstract: An enhanced multimedia device driver for personal computers includes a polling process which performs polling of the hardware devices. The device driver creates a helper thread for each hardware device which executes in the client context. Each polling process wakes up at a regular interval at which time it polls the status register of the corresponding hardware device. If there is an event pending at the status register, then the polling process signals the event pending to all of the helper threads. Each helper thread wakes up and checks the reason for the wakeup. At this point, the helper thread will initiate a data transfer using programmed I/O if called for by the reason for the wakeup. Through the use of the present invention, the DMA controller, the system interrupt controller, and the kernel interrupt handler of the kernel are not employed in data transfers and the use of DMAs and/or IRQs for data transfers is eliminated.