DVD-ROM Slow

The_B_Man

ive got a dvd-16x oem316b dvd drive and when i try to watch DVDs, it might get a few seconds in then stutter and then stop completely, sometimes hanging powerDVD or watever im usin, while the light on the dvd drive keeps flashin as if its still searchin for the data or watever! its not just DVDs, it's slow reading CD-roms aswell. DMA is enabled and it sez "Ultra DMA Mode 2" for the secondary IDE controller (master & slave) in Device Manager. the DVD-ROM is set to secondary master, CDRW to secondary slave. ive a 120gb western digital on pri master and iomega zip 250 drive on pri slave. my mobo is GA-7VKLMS, 512mb ram, amd athlon xp 2200+. in BIOS, both ide channels are set to ata 66/100. any ideas?

captainpat

If you've been playing Vid Shop DVDs in the drive, it might have picked up some dirt on the lens, causing lots of retries. Get a DVD drive cleaner, the CD ones don't always line up right.

Is your Graphics card up to scratch? On-board video can be slow.

Defrag your c: drive in case temp files are not getting contiguous space.

Good luck!

The_B_Man

i cleaned the lens, so its not that! i dont think its the graphics coz it used to work, although that was b4 i upgraded from xp home to xp pro.

would it make a difference if me 120gb hd was down to 10gb?

btw wen i try defrag it sez i need at least 15 gb's to defrag properly!

captainpat

10 GB would be fine for operating normally. Defrag has a dumb formula for that message, it just wants 15% of the disk capacity. For best results, download a trial copy of Diskeeper and run it a few times. It frees up space each time, and consolidates the free space, allowing big files to be defragged next run. You should be able to get rid of the red on the disk map by running Diskeeper a few times.

The_B_Man

would that even be a factor though? i mean would a badly fragmented hard drive decrease performance of a dvd rom? or wud it be more a case of the actual software ie powerDVD is fragmented? i was considering removin the dvd rom and puttin on the floor and standin on me bed and leg droppin it Hulk Hogan style, do u think that'd help?

captainpat

This is all guesswork, anyway. Your Hulk act would help you if nothing else.
I was thinking of temporary files used as buffers for reading big chunks of video and maybe unpacking the Mpeg2 coding (or something).

Maybe borrowing another drive for a test would be worth a try.