Tylenol => Acetaminophen. Yes, definitely a pain killer! :-) I prefer Ibuprofen, myself. ;-)
I have WinDVD on my XP Pro/MDK 9.0 box. I'll take a look at it and see if I can find any settings that she could experiment with, or that make a noticable difference in the way it plays DVDs. Of course, we use NTSC here, not PAL, so hopefully I won't suggest something that wouldn't make sense for you... As for the daughters? Well, I have two, one 18 in college and the other 22 just out of college and on her own. Both are aware of Linux (they are forced to use it when they are home! MDK 8.2 on an old box...), but both are also too into their own lives to care about putting any effort into learning a new Operating System (XP was enough of a shock for them.) Somehow, I always thought that having a techie father in the computer business would have rubbed off onto them. (sigh) There's always time, I suppose... :-( T P.S. I am still trying to get my Hauppage video capture card to work with the appropriate program and it looks like my Earthlink freebie digital camera is not compatible. If I come up with anything that's worth mentioning, I will pass it on here. Haven't forgotten you. :-) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anne Wilson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2002 11:11 AM Subject: Re: [newbie] Totally OT - dvd oddities 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
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