My brother has an HP laptop. Not sure of the model but he bought it brand new last year. it has a Phillips internal DVD-ROM drive and he has an HP external drive. Again, not sure of model #'s. He said lately he's been having choppy playback of his DVD's, both original and burned ones. He used to get virtually flawless playback. If his firmware needs updating, could this help fix it? He said it does the same thing whether he used WMP or PowerDVD so it's probably not a software problem. But I'm no expert ;-). Thanks guys.
Thanks. I was going to let him borrow my lens cleaner to let him try that first. I don't think he's ever cleaned the lenses. That will probably fix it.
Firmware recognises & identifies specific blank media, that is one of its primary functions. A Firmware update will not help playback - besides think, it used to play back perfectly already (you said).
The DVDs are playing back in Software though, remember.
Tell your brother to Ctrl/Alt/Del (Windows Task Manager), then click 'Performance'.
The issues here are CPU and Memory.
If you have your DVD slaved to your HD, and you have low memory, and a big heavily-used swapfile, then you're in shit because the HP laptop can't read from the HD and the DVD at the same time.
Performance breaks down, memory builds up - the laptop is not returning the software DVD decoding performance it once did.
Check the Task Manager - I get systems where the CPU never goes below 15-20% (just sitting there, idle). Fulla crap.
Tune up the computer, run Spybot S&D, LavaSoft AdAware, and even Hijack This! (strong medicine - only if req'd to allow the first two to run).
Don't start all this automatic crap when you turn on the laptop (it builds up over time). Clean out the 'Startup' folder.
Defrag the HD.
Tell him to open the Performance thing in Task Manager, then minimize it, then play DVD.
The time-delay graph will then show the status of when he was playing the DVDs.
And yes clean the lens, update the firmware, always good advice :^)
But most peoples computers run like crap, they're half what they were new, all clogged up with detritus, they require maintenance badly, they're pooched y'know?
Make sure your brother's isn't one of them, and his DVD performance will return (and maybe even be better than ever, LoL :^)
Let us know,
L8R
Tip:
On your home PC, make sure your swapfile and your OS are on different HDs on different controllers, if possible.
Where do I look to see how much memory is being used or available? Is it the same as the "PF Usage" in Windows Task Manager under "Performance?" My CPU has 512 mb of memory and the PF usage says 282 mb. My "CPU usage" stays around 2% and lower. That's good, right?
