I have a fairly old XP laptop computer running at about 1.5 GHz. Some DVDs
play fine but some recent ones have been very juddery as if the processor
hasn't sufficient power to decode the video so breaks up the picture. The
sound quality is fine.

Can I buy a PCMCIA card to speed things along? I can't find any display
adaptor in System - Hardware under Sound, video and games controllers
other than "Legacy Video Capture Devices", "Media Control Devices" and
"Video Codecs".

"Wallace" wrote in message
...
I have a fairly old XP laptop computer running at about 1.5 GHz. Some DVDs
play fine but some recent ones have been very juddery as if the processor
hasn't sufficient power to decode the video so breaks up the picture. The
sound quality is fine.

Can I buy a PCMCIA card to speed things along? I can't find any display
adaptor in System - Hardware under Sound, video and games controllers
other than "Legacy Video Capture Devices", "Media Control Devices" and
"Video Codecs".

Rip one of the jittery DVDs to your laptop's hard drive and play it from
there. If the jitter persists, your CPU isn't beefy enough to play the
content. If it plays fine, then your DVD drive isn't quick enough.

I don't think an external PCMCIA drive will make a great deal of difference.
I have a "cardbus" adapter for a DVD drive, and it still serves data slower
than the built-in drive.

In message , G Hardy
writes
"Wallace" wrote in message
...
I have a fairly old XP laptop computer running at about 1.5 GHz. Some DVDs
play fine but some recent ones have been very juddery as if the processor
hasn't sufficient power to decode the video so breaks up the picture. The
sound quality is fine.

Can I buy a PCMCIA card to speed things along? I can't find any display
adaptor in System - Hardware under Sound, video and games controllers
other than "Legacy Video Capture Devices", "Media Control Devices" and
"Video Codecs".

Rip one of the jittery DVDs to your laptop's hard drive and play it from
there. If the jitter persists, your CPU isn't beefy enough to play the
content. If it plays fine, then your DVD drive isn't quick enough.

I don't think an external PCMCIA drive will make a great deal of difference.
I have a "cardbus" adapter for a DVD drive, and it still serves data slower
than the built-in drive.

I would have thought that a 1.5GHz PC would be plenty beefy enough for
playing DVDs.

I'd suggest to Wallace that he makes sure that he has no other programs
running in the background [1], and maybe run EndItAll to close any
unnecessary background tasks.

[1] Some AV programs eat away at system resources,
Norton in particular.
--
Tony Morgan

On Sat, 03 Feb 2007 11:49:03 GMT, "Wallace" wrote:

I have a fairly old XP laptop computer running at about 1.5 GHz. Some DVDs
play fine but some recent ones have been very juddery as if the processor
hasn't sufficient power to decode the video so breaks up the picture. The
sound quality is fine.


Something to check :

Go to Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager

Now look for the IDE/ATA controllers, and view the settings for
Primary IDE channel. It's likely your hard drives are connected to
that channel. Under Advanced Settings, you should see current transfer
mode listed as Ultra DMA mode, with the Transfer Mode dropdown set to
"DMA if available".

Repeat those steps for the secondary IDE channel. Now, if you see "PIO
mode" selected for Transfer Mode, change that to "DMA if available"

See if that change has any effect on your playback - many DVD drives
after install, default to PIO mode (slow) when they should be set to
DMA mode.



Can I buy a PCMCIA card to speed things along?

You would need a modern PCI (not PCMCIA) or AGP graphics card which
offers some benefit to video acceleration under windows. Usually a new
AGP card is about $25, eg some of the NVidia 5200FX series.

I can't find any display
adaptor in System - Hardware under Sound, video and games controllers
other than "Legacy Video Capture Devices", "Media Control Devices" and
"Video Codecs".


That's because the graphics card is listed under Display Adapters ;-)


Cheers - Neil
------------------------------------------------
Digital Media MVP : 2004-2007
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs

The easiest way to check the DVD speed is to copy something from DVD disk to
the hard drive. Although the better way could be to install a freeware DVD
Shrink, order it to copy this DVD and watch how fast it works. I guess the
real answer was in the original question when the author wrote that he
doesn't see any good drivers for this laptop, but Legacy something. That
means that already lost the whole possible speed of his machine using these
fakes installed on his laptop. 1.5 is more than enough to watch a good
movie. Also I briefly saw that someone recommended to check UDMA mode for
his hard drives and especially for the DVD drive. Yes, that's maybe even
more important than video drivers if they don't work correctly or just not
properly installed.

Regarding the external devices... That's funny but when I bought an external
box for my internal DVD drive that I grabbed from my desktop system,
inserted it into this NexStar DX box and connected to my USB port I got the
speed from my DVD much higher than from the internal DVD drive. For example
I can drab my CD disks for 3-4 minutes, it was usually taking 3-4 times
longer with my internal DVD drive. Same for DVD disks, the external one
grabs the whole DVD disk for 10-15 minutes (without compression), don't
remember exactly, but can test it out if required, it's a double layer +/-
Plextor, not even the latest one. The internal DVD drive (Philips) can grab
the same disks for at least 52-55 minutes even working in UDMA mode.

Just D.

"G Hardy" wrote in message
...
"Wallace" wrote in message
...
I have a fairly old XP laptop computer running at about 1.5 GHz. Some DVDs
play fine but some recent ones have been very juddery as if the processor
hasn't sufficient power to decode the video so breaks up the picture. The
sound quality is fine.

Can I buy a PCMCIA card to speed things along? I can't find any display
adaptor in System - Hardware under Sound, video and games controllers
other than "Legacy Video Capture Devices", "Media Control Devices" and
"Video Codecs".

Rip one of the jittery DVDs to your laptop's hard drive and play it from
there. If the jitter persists, your CPU isn't beefy enough to play the
content. If it plays fine, then your DVD drive isn't quick enough.

I don't think an external PCMCIA drive will make a great deal of
difference. I have a "cardbus" adapter for a DVD drive, and it still
serves data slower than the built-in drive.

"Tony Morgan" wrote in message
...

I would have thought that a 1.5GHz PC would be plenty beefy enough for
playing DVDs.

Definitely. I occasionally get jitter playing back VOBs from the HDD on my
500MHz PIII laptop, but it almost always happens when playing them through
the cardbus DVD adapter. This leads me to believe that some DVDs present
more of a burden to the decoding process, so it's worth ripping them if you
get the jitter. If there's no jitter from the HDD, then the problem is with
the DVD drive throughput. Otherwise, the problem is elsewhere (such as the
CPU not being up to the job).

I missed the "1.5GHz" thing in the original post, focusing instead on
"laptop".. )