On Mon, 24 Nov 2003 17:31:34 -0000, "-" wrote:

I'm finding that my DVD drive is very stuttery and basically useless - I'm
wondering if its been set up properly. The CD-ROM drive is master, but the
IDE cable goes into the DVD drive first (ie is closest to the motherboard
IDE controller). If the CD drive is master, is it going to the cd drive to
find the dvd drive to play the dvd first? Surely that's not efficient - but
then again, the cable is closer to the motherboard from the DVD drive...

So, I'm not clear on the way it works speed-wise. My graphics card
incidentally, is a Geforce MX440 and I have 512 ram with a 1800+xp athlon,
so my system should be able to play DVDs fine. Its the same with different
software.

Thanks for any clarification on the above problem.



Windows?

Check Device Manager, enable DMA mode (if available) ... not having
DMA enabled is the most likely cause.

Possibly you have a buggy drive, one or the other, and it would help
to switch them, their master slave positions, but there is no issue
involved with finding the DVD drive to play a DVD as you wrote, it
would be fine where it is if everything else is working right. Indeed
your system is much faster than needed to play a DVD, takes about a
400MHz system and vidcard with MPEG acceleration or 200MHz faster CPU
to compensate for a video card shortcoming, which doesn't apply to
your video card at all... may not be the greatest for modern games but
a lot faster than needed for DVD.


Dave