On Saturday 09 Nov 2002 1:29 pm, you wrote: > When I had my DVD drive on a Win 98 SE box, I found performance to be > mediocre, at best. There's a need for a lot of processing power to run > commercial DVDs with any semblance of enjoyment in mind. I can barely do it > with my 500 MHz machines. My daughter both have Dells with 1.2 GHz > processors and Win XP; they just approach a decent frame rate throughput. > The more memory the better. At least 128 MBs, 256 MBs wouldn't hurt.
She has 1.2 GHz and 256 Mb RAM, so that should be OK. > Adding > DMA support to the drive will make a big difference, as long as Win 98 and > the motherboard will allow it to happen. It's a brand new motherboard, so I would think so. I don't remember checking that DMA was enabled, so I'll get her to do that. > Lastly, she must make sure that > there aren't any programs or applets running in the background and as > little as possible in her System Tray. Antivirus programs, office suite > pre-start applets, anything in the System Tray is taking up valuable > resources that may be need to run DVDs, and may actually conflict with the > program. Fair enough, I'll tell her to shut down everything she can. > What program is she running to view her DVDs? PowerDVD? WinDVD? WinDVD > Make sure that when she goes into Control Panel | Device Manager, she sees > at least 75% free on resources. 80-85% is heavenly for Win 98! Crashes will > begin to occur as you approach 70% or less. > > Assuming she has all of the above going for her, it could be that her > computer needs a lot of tweaking. There's a lot to be done on Win 98 to get > high-performance apps to run right. Keeping the system lean and mean (not > commonly so with a "new" computer) is critical. All that "convenience" and > tech support junk that they preload reminds me of the emission controls we > had on our cars in the States back in the 70's. You had to add more > horsepower to make up for the choking emission controls. Utlimately, the > engine just lost its umph and never ran well. Whenever I get my hands on a > client's machine, or reload from scratch, I won't load that stuff back on. > When the client gets the computer back, they are always excited about the > snappiness of the system and how they can do stuff they couldn't before. > That might be all that your daughter needs -- a little system tweaking. Are > you up to muddling through a Windows system? ;-) OK - next time I can get to her machine, I'll see what I can do. Any specific advice always welcome :-) Just remember to bring the Tylenol. :-D Don't know Tylenol - but my guess is headache pills? BTW, my grandson is nibbling at the edges of interest in installing Linux. It will be a good while before either daughter does, but with any luck I'll have one convert soon. Thanks Anne
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