PCTech Forums

I had an old dvd burner for my computer that couldnt even play cds with out it being all choppy, so I figured it was time to get a new one. And now that I have I'm still getting the same problem. So i dont think its the dvd drive....but I cant figure out what would keep it from playing cleanly. I even tried playing it with no extra programs running and all that. what is this best way to trouble shoot this and fix it? my cd drive plays and burns just fine though.

Could you please post the other hardware in your PC?
I've known music to skip before but it was down to the PC being veeeery old and slow.

what exactly do you all need?

i have a dell 8400 with upgraded to 2gb of ram and has none of the stock HD (I have 2 internal, and one external), plus none of the stock drives, bought a new cd drive years ago and the dvd drive that i just mentioned. everything else is still stock.

i know its old but id think it would be able to run atleast what it came with especially with upgraded ram.......

bump

i would suggest checking to see if dma mode is active.

right click my computer>properties>hardware>device manager

expand IDE ATA/ATPI Controllers

depending on how your cabling is, will determine which controller the drive is on. Because of other drives in the machine, im assuming this is a IDE drive on the secondary channel.

If so, right click that channel or the appropriate one and open properties>advanced settings.

Auto detection and dma if available would be optimum choices for both optical drives.

may not be it but its something to check.

under ide ata i have primary ide channel, so i changed the device 1 since it was set to pio. device 0 was already on dma. ill try this out and see how it goes.

still not working. it seems like video plays back pretty cleanly but there is like a clipping noise with the sound. but i tried to burn a few concert dvds the other day and the video skips there. i play them in my dvd player and it will just jump from one point to another in the song.

i usually use my other drive for cds but figured id see if it clips with cds just now and it wont even play them.... it gives me this "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Folder Options control panel"

Merry Christmas : )

you have 2 optical drives right?

primary ide device 0 should be hard drive
" " 1 should be optical

assuming your hard drive is IDE and not SATA

this would put a second ide drive on secondary ide controller device 0

the hard drives are sata...

well then...im all guessed out.

the other day i took the drive and hooked it up to my parents computer just to double check, and it ran perfect. is it possible that maybe my anti-virus could be messing with it?

humm... possible, if it worked on another machine fine then it could very well be software related. Surely 2 gigs of ram would allow playback of anything to run smoothly. Maybe check to see if your AV has a live monitoring of your optical drives and shut it off to test. Its not exactly a common problem but you never know. Something that does come to mind, what type of ide cable are you using? A 40 wire cable could be responsible for slow transfers which would lead to stuttering/skipping. Make sure you have 80 wire IDE cables and you may even consider separating the drives, putting 1 to each channel. Do they skip with only one drive connected at a time?

another quick note about cables

blue to motherboard
black to master
grey to slave