Hey all - I'm hoping this is the right spot. I was really surprised the search engine didn't turn anything up. I use a Dell Inspiron hooked up to an LCD tv for blu ray playback. The BD drive is a sony, and I use the PowerDVD software that came with it for playback. It's like a 7.x version modified for BD support. The video card is a GeForce 8600. I have Vista. 2GB ram. The processor is a 2.4 Core Duo. Think that's all the tech. While I'm watching some BD movies, the hard drive light flickers very actively and the playback gets really choppy. Sometimes it lasts for a second or two, sometimes for several. What I was hoping to get here were some tips on improving playback smoothness. I exit out of as many background/tray programs as I can, and I already changed the pagefile to 3072 (rather than automatic), and that helped quite a bit, but it still happens occasionally. Anything else I can do? Thanks in advance.
When it happens you might try Ctrl-Alt-Delete an d see what task is running. Make sure that FastFind is turned off. It might be indexing the drive.
I have the same cpu as you.. upgrade your video card I have a 4870 and 4850 crossfired and my cpu load is like 12 percent so I know its all on my GpU get at least a 8800gt should take care of all the problems if you want ati there is the 4670 my brother uses that and a extrema quad core at 3.0 but his laod on cpu is 60 percent while mine is a tiny 12...
The 8xxx series GPU's were disigned to play HD content, even a 8400 will play BR discs. I had 2 7300GT's in SLI with an AMD 64x2 1900+ oc'd to 2.7 GHz that played discs with less than 50% processor usage. I found that the program used made a difference. WinDVD did stress the system more than PowerDVD. And newer versions of PowerDVD were more kind. That was with 7300GT cards. I would check the Nvidia site for the newest graphics drivers, that sometimes can make a big difference. ---Chikn