DVD won't play properly

[Genny]

I have a problem using a DVD player. It came with the PC (secondhand) but I think someone swapped the graphics card for an older one (S3 trio 2x) and the DVD wasn't set up. Anyway, I got a new driver for the graphics card and installed Soundblaster PCI 16 soundcard as the soundcard had been removed. DVDs wouldn't play at all.

I downloaded a software Mpeg-2 player which means the DVDs will now play but only slowly with lots of stops and starts.

Any advice on how I can get the thing working properly? Is it possible with this soundcard and graphics card? The PC has a 1GHz processor, 128 MB Ram and 20GB hard drive. Does the graphics setting (256 / 16 bit / 24 bit colour etc) make any difference?

Any suggestions at all would be much appreciated.
Cheers!

[Wer-Al Zwowe]

It can help to remove some programs from the memory or to buy extra RAM.

[Genny]

Thanks for the advice. I think the memory is fairly empty, but I have reset colours to 16 bit and this seems to help - the videos now play fine but only in a box, not the full screen. I have a feeling I need new hardware to improve things further.

Thanks again.
Genny

[Trancemaster]

My advice would be to do a complete rebuild on your PC. Trying to fix problems is one thing, but I think you could probably do a lot of it by reinstalling Windows, or even formatting your primary drive if you can. You could spend months trying to fix it, but a rebuild will only take 1 day, 2 at most.

[UncasMS]

most important imho is DMA mode ON!

[Genny]

Many thanks for the advice.

Re. formatting hard drive - I did that only two weeks ago, so presume that there's nothing terribly wrong there. And I've re-installed windows at least twice in the last week to try and get my modem sorted (new modem came without documentation to say which model it was, so my brilliant computer whizz friend trawled through until he found the one which worked. I intend to complain to the supplier - it would have been so much easier if they'd sent a bit of paper with the model name and number on it).

My dvd player seemed to work a lot better as soon as I changed back to 16 bit colour, but at the same time I did check the dma box (in spite of scary warnings about possible problems with hardware if I did this), so maybe that did the trick. It still won't play properly at full screen size though. I suspect maybe my graphics or sound card (S3 trio 2x and Soundblaster 16 PCI) aren't up to it. The dvds don't play automatically either - I have to open them through the MPEG2 player. Still, it's a whole lot better than it was.

Thanks everyone.
Genny