galahs

Excellent news that SP3 Beta 1 now includes support for +137GB hard drives Did you decide to use version .2222 or .2225 of LLXX's ESDI_506.PDR (Hopefully .2225) ANSWER: It is .2225 and its in the SP2.cab file (perfect for slipstreaming) THANKS GAPE!!!! :thumbup

Black screens only save energy on CRT monitors. a black screen on an LCD monitor actually uses slightly more power as it requires power to charge the quarts to block the backlight. On an LCD monitor the most power efficiant background is white.

Wow, the best I ever managed was 98% What did you do / remove? I imagine opening the Performance tab alone would take up resources preventing 100% being available.

Personally I would feel quite comfortable not using any updates as long as your not using Internet Explorer and you have a software or hardware (built into many adsl/cable modems) firewall.

Mine was pre formatted with NTFS I used SwissKnife V3.22 (Convert NTFS to FAT32) --- http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm to make a 350GB FAT32 drive

Why format it as NTFS, wouldn't FAT32 be better?

So has the download in the first post to 2.50 been updated to include the fixes?

interesting. might be worth a try.

Just to let you know I will update the list in the next few days. Just been on holidays.

I can't distinguish and performance difference between PowerDVD 2 trial and PowerDVD 3. Both play ok. PowerDVD 3 has the edge on picture quality however.

Thanks glock, I will give it a try. I tried Zoom player and it is on par with MPC. Still not as good as PowerDVD 3.

If you would that would be great. I'm sure some other members would love to know too. I know how to put the swap file on there but the rest I wouldn't have a clue.

I've been mucking around with XMSDSK.EXE ramdisk but everytime I put my swap file into my RAM drive it gets listed as operating in MS DOS Compatability Mode. I read a user had the same problem but it still worked faster than a disk drive... but would it run even faster if it was in 32bit mode? Also my config.sys is completely empty. No HIMEM.SYS and no EMM386.EXE Is that good or bad?

Testing with cacheman again I noticed my Paging File (Virtual Memory Swap File) jumps by 18MB when I start playing a dvd with MPC and Lalim DVD player. Currently I have ConservativeSwapfileUsage=0 (off) might retry it with ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 (on) Edit: PowerDVD 3 does not seem to increase the paging file size. Maybe this explains its higher performance?

How do you tell windows to place those files (operating system specific ones like the registry in particular) on a RAM disk

Whoops I've been using Novel's edition. I assumed the main Open Office would have supported it too. Looks like the stock OpenOffice has it planned in a near release. I have managed to get the Compatability pack to open .docx files in Word 2000. Then I just save them as .doc files Also try http://docx-converter.com/ If your super desperate you can always use a (paid) online converters like http://www.docx2doc.com/ for Word documents.

The light doesn't synchronise with the DVD activity light. After some reading online I now think dvd programs cache the data to disk before reading it. I wonder if I could optimise that so the program buffers further ahead. Anyone used DVDIdle with good results on slower systems? I am using Media Player Classic 6.4.9.1

Yep. I had Media Player Classic using them. What I don't understand is currently I have MPC using PowerDVD 3's codec but PowerDVD 3 can play the files so much better than MPC can. Does that mean the program overheads of MPC are higher than PowerDVD 3?

Does anybody have the trial versions of WinDVD 2000 and/or PowerDVD 2.55 that they can send me?

Wow! Low system requirments! Minimal requirements: -486DX computer (486 with built-in FPU) -4/8/16 or more MB of RAM (I don't know...I have 64MB...) -SVGA card (640x480 resolution and 8/15/16/24/32 color bits/pixel) -SB Pro or compatible soundcard (11025 Hz, 8 bit, stereo) -DVD drive with drivers installed (CDROM.SYS included in the package) -a single layer and region-free DVD movie disc -lots of spare time because DVD4DOS Beta1 is not a realtime player and very slow...(tested with my Pentium 120 MHz computer... transcoding 1 min movie takes cca. 1 hour) I have been trying to modify my DVD-ROM read ahead cache to see if that makes a difference. First I set it none. Tested and Later used Cacheman 5.50 to set it to 4638kb . Performance was bad with it set to none, but I couldn't tell any difference between 4638kb and the standard setting of 1238kb's. Cacheman says the following: What disk cache settings would then be best for DVD playback?

Yep, install Open Office. http://www.openoffice.org

Opening a church anytime soon ? The Win9x Congregation! Can anyone tell me why playing a dvd causes hard disk activity? My hard disk light is constantly flashing throughout playback. I thought it might be to do with accessing virtual memory, but my system has 256MB of ram and with the DVD running there is still plenty of free RAM available. I thought this might be because of the way Win98SE handles memory allocation but I experience the same thing in WinXP. If I could get it to stop constantly accessing the Hard Disk I might just free up come cpu cycles allowing me to have stutter free play back.

Ye of little faith! PowerDVD 3 works almost perfect though with CPU usage of 90%, PowerDVD 1.5 trial is a touch lower at around 85% (if only I could find a full version) Yet to test the older WinDVD formats (also hard to find)

VLC and KM Player both had playback glitches (mostly in the sound). I used the registry tweak to allow Media Player 6.4 to play DVD's, it used the PowerDVD 3.0 decoder it appears but struggled to display a smooth image and sound. Interesting. The same codec but worse performance.

Thanks I will give it a go