Keelor

I recently installed XP after my old hard drive decided to fail (avoiding GXPs from now on...). I was really enjoying the fact that XP less than a minute to boot, after 2000 had started taking almost 5 minutes. Then, when I finally removed the faulty hard drive (which still had information on it that I had managed to recover), my boot time suddenly jumped to 3-5 minutes. When I thought back, I realized that my 2000 boot time had also increased after a change in my hard drive configuration. I suspect that XP is detecting the changes in my hard drive configuration, but deciding not to make the changes permanent. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Okay, I've been working on this problem for a while now, and I just can't seem to pin it down. Here's the deal: whenever I play any DVD in my DVD drive, the movie stops at some fixed point in the movie (generally about a half hour, sometimes about an hour) and won't continue past that point. Here are the various "fixes" I've tried: 1. Playing with the DXR3 decoder, and playing with the PowerDVD software player 2. Switching the DVD drive to the master of the secondary chain 3. Disabling and enabling DMA 4. Buying a new drive 5. Uninstalling and reinstalling the DXR3 drivers (PowerDVD software still had the same problem even with no hardware decoder drivers) 6. Ending all possible tasks and processes 7. Changing video card drivers Here's my setup: Windows 2000 Primary IDE channel: IBM 30 GB GXP as master, DVD Drive (was Hitachi GD-2000, a generic 8X now) Secondary IDE channel: PlexWriter 12/10/32A on master Hercules GeForce2 Sound Blaster Live! DXR3 decoder card Linksys ethernet card AMD 800 MHz Thunderbird MSI K7T Pro Note that DVDs played fine until a few weeks ago, but I can't figure out what changed to cause the problem--the most likely culprit seemed to be the new PlexWriter, but I removed that and it didn't do anything. Does anyone have _any_ idea what's going on here? I'm getting extremely desperate. ~=Keelor

The only reason I had even installed the PowerDVD software was to figure out if I had encountered a bug in the Creative Player. The fact that both a software decoder and a hardware decoder stopped in the exact same spot indicated to me that the problem was somewhere else--which is was. The PowerDVD software wasn't even the full version--I just needed "outside" verification of the problem. Like I said, it was all Plextor's fault anyway. ~=Keelor

Actually, I had tried that, and it didn't do anything to help. After a few hours of work this morning, though, I figured out the culprit--the "Plextor Manager 2000". Once I uninstalled that, my DVD player went back to working perfectly. ~=Keelor