What version of windows are you running? Although this could be a problem with the drive, I reckon it is more likely that it is not set up correctly - stuttering could be something to do with the DMA configuration of the drive. Another possible problem is that the drive is not identified correctly in your bios settings, or that windows is still 'seeing' the old drive, thus leading to the 'disc 2' confusion.
The crashing in PowerDVD could well be down to your video card. In order for it to operate correctly, you will probably need to install a newer version of DirectX, or get an updated video driver. These on board video cards are, from experience, ususally bad news as they share the system memory, leading to instability when the system is heavily loaded, as a chip of that speed would be when running a DVD.
HTH
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Yes that does help....like help me realise I should have left this well alone and waited for a complete new PC with current specs!
I have W.98SE. I remember seeing something about enabling DMA in the instructions and finding it was already set with the old CD-ROM drive. I didn't expect to go to the BIOS (bit beyond me) but the PC seems to know the new drive is there. In Control Panel/System it has showed the change of brand/model to our new Samsung.
I note your comments about RAM requirements, I thought this would be OK with almost 200MB, after all it started with just 64MB.
Does it really come down to the fact that a machine of this spec will never run DVDs?
The stuttering on music CDs is definately affected by how hard the PC is working...but it never affected the old standard CD-ROM drive like this.
An odd thing is that it will play music without stuttering if the old Windows CD Player is used rather than Media Player.
Oh one last thing. My old CD-ROM drive was set to CS on the jumper plugs. As it was the only drive on the ribbon it seemed it ought to be set to MA (master) so that is what I've done with the new drive plug. Could that be the problem? What is the CS setting for?
M.M
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Did not notice whether it had been answered.CS means cable select
What that means is the bios.When you switch on the pc.Checks for the drive`s.Cs makes the bios detect where on cable the drive is located
as most IDE cables have master and slave plugs on them.
your cd drive only had one plug so master is the one to use.
Is that a 500mhz processor you have?
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Thanks. Wonder why Hewlett Packard set up this PC from new with the old CD-ROM plug at CS when it was the only cd drive? It might not make sense but I may just try setting the new drive to CS rather than Master and see what happens.
Yes it is an AMD K-6 500mhz chip.
M.M
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Being you only have the one cd drive.It would not make sense to to this as would slighty slow the bios detection of the drive.
As a matter of interest the reason the dvd player is slow is the proccesor is almost at minimum requirement spec for dvd playback.
Plus you would need to increase the amount of main memory to around 512 MB.192 is not enough for dvd.I realise the min/spec
is around 128MB.
but that would give a poor if not impossible playback as you allready mentioned.
The virtual memory is only there to assist the main memory
problem lie`s in the data transmission delay in topping up main memory to graphics card if it takes ages to top up so doe`s the picture on your monitor.
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I agree with MV over the stuttering issue - if you have built in graphics and sound, playing a DVD results in a lot of information flying about in different directions. With an older chip like the K6-2 and the slower memory you'll have, you may expect some stutters. Did audio CDs also stutter in your old drive?
I had a few powerDVD issues on a previous install too, of a similar type. I'd uninstall it, make sure you have no other programs running in the background (virus checkers, firewalls, chat programs) and then reinstall from scratch. If you do get it running for a moment, try to run the drive check option from the menu (I forget which one, sorry). You might also want to go into the device manager, into the properties for the drive, and make sure that DMA for that drive is enabled - if you restart the machine and it stays ticked then it's working.
Page faults usually occur when one program encroaches on resources being used by another, or when a program isn't suitable for the operating system. It's also worth checking that you have a decent ampount of free space on your C drive for virtual memory to work properly - about 500mb minimum is what you should be aiming for.
The disk recognition thing can be for a number of reasons. Does the drive have the same letter the old one had before? It might also not have autorun switched on, so try openin my computer and pressing 'F5' to refresh the view before you attempt to run the game. If this is the case, it can be turned on in the device manager, in the same bit as the DMA setting. THere are a few games that only seem to run from the drive they were installed from, so you may have to resort to a reinstall over the original - this should keep your settings intact.
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Kuang,
More good points, thanks.
Accept what you say about the possible DVD/chip/memory/video card issues with this older machine.
Audio CDs were always very good with the basic LG brand CD-ROM drive fitted by the makers. With the above average speakers the sound was actually pretty good.
The DMA option seems to be properly enabled. I will try a reinstall of PowerDVD with all the rest of the clutter turned off.
Accept what you say about page faults, we do have loads of free hard drive space though....13GB unused.
Yes the new drive letter is the same as before, "D". Funnily enough Autorun almost never seems to happen with this PC but I thought it was ticked. I assume it is the box marked something like "Auto Insert Notification" found in Control Panel/System/Device Manager/CD-ROM/Settings.
Took the point about some games only running on the drive they are loaded with. Tried to reinstall a couple and they come up with something like "no disc" or "drive not available" when I try to install them.
In fact every game we have (99% simple kids ones from a few years ago) either doesn't run at all or the sound is missing now.
Also just found that a Quicktime movie we have on CD plays with the sound missing.
This is a pretty comprehensive set of issues isn't it!! I'm tempted to see if PC World will swap it for another brand of drive, and one without the DVD playing facility.
Or could it be the one in a million drive that is faulty from new and struggles to read anything but the most basic CD.
M.M
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MM. Uncanny but you have exactly the same spec as I have including the AMD 500, 20gb, 192RAM and win 98 (not SE0.and desktop.
I installed the 20GB and left the existing 740MB in and is used as a backup disk.
A few months ago my CD player gave up the ghost and I installed a LG CD player given to me by my cousin who had just installed a CDRW.
I had lots of problems with the computer crashing and switched jumper settings as I suspected they were the problem. And indeed I had the same messages that the drive wasn't detected etc.
After many many hours I decided to take the bull by the horns and reinstall windows and hope it would sort itself out.
I was resigned to making things worse but it worked. It made a clean install, didn't change any other settings and everything worked perfectly.
Not saying this will work for you but after reading that IRQ and Bios settings could be the problem for mine I didnt fancy altering these and hoped that windows itself would sort it for me. And sure enough it did.
Incidentally if you have Norton antivirus and firewall installed I have found they can do some funny things to the smooth running of the computer under some circumstances. Last week I did a live update. A few days later did the same and when the download began it froze and then crashed the computer. It repeatedly did this until I found that by disabling the firewall it will download succesfully which is how I now have to carry this out.
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I have to be careful what I say M.M. but if my experience at PC World is anything to go by then I would liken them to Volkswagen Dealers. I think I'm allowed to say that am I Dave? :-)
--
"Give Way"? Wait....I know this one...give me a minute
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I distinctly recall standing in PCW looking for a particular cable. An assistant wandered over to help, so I described the cable I needed. She was emphatic that it didn't exist.
I thought that was a bit odd as it was essential in order to connect a printer switch that I was holding in my hand, having just taken it off their shelf elsewhere in the same shop. So I tried to perduade her that it must exist while still scanning the shelf.
She was still emphatically saying that it did not exist and could not exist when I picked the very cable up from the rack - "Ooh look at this!" :-))
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The best thing about the PCW nearest to us is the Maplins next door.
A while back I was looking for PC100 SDRAM for an old computer. Went to PCW and spoke to a "Department Supervisor": "Oh no sir, we don't do that any more. Outdated, you see."
Bloke in Maplins: "Yes of course. How much do you want?"
When told what PCW had said the bloke in Maplins said they were idiots and told me which shelf in PCW I could find it on. And he was right.
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mm: check how good dixons group companies are with their customers.
mastercare.blogspot.com/
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There are so many issues here I am wondering just how long it might take to sort all the individual errors....if they ever could be. And just suppose I spend days of spare time on it and in the end the new drive turns out to have a reading problem.
I think I'll give it just one more hour fiddling and then we'll see what PC World say. I'll box it all back up and go to their helpdesk for a refund or a cheaper CD-Writer only (no DVD) plus credit note... a different brand with different bundled software.
I did get a member of staff to assist me with the purchase decision and hope they might see I did my best to get a suitable drive.
Very interesting to hear your experiences Alvin. Trouble is my PC only has a complete recovery disc with Windows and every other program it was sold with all together. It loads these after wiping the hard drive down to nothing. I know from experience it takes a couple of days to get the current configuration back after doing a recovery...a really onerous task and i've not got that time spare for weeks.
AS a matter of interest I too have all the "extras* which I'm sure can complicate the issue....
Norton A/V, ZoneAlarm, Windows Washer, Spybot, AdAware and loads more. These can all be found running in the background at odd times despite their actual program not being called up.
By the way anyone heard of Asus(sp?) CD drives?
Thanks,
M.M
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Just a thought on something that doesn't seem to have been mentioned - did you let windoze recognise the new device and proceed accordingly, or did you go by another installation route?
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fb,
The instructions with the new CD-R said to fit it in place of the existing CD-ROM** and just fire up the PC. It specifically stated that Windows 98SE would have the drivers already for this new CD-R.
That seemed to be correct as that funny little box came up saying about settings as Windows booted. Then the new drive worked OK to load all the programs that came with it.
I did get Windows to search the three CDs that came with the drive, to see if there was a better driver. It said the original one was the latest.
Bit odd because my Windows version is from 1999/2000 (I think) and I'm sure 52X CD-R/RW/DVD drives were not common then.
**Have I said before I only have one large drive bay so I can't add the drive to my existing CD-ROM...pity because I think that would help with the diagnosis.
Thanks,
M.M
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Just a thought: would you be better off exchanging it for an external CD/RW that runs on USB? Having two drives can be useful at times (e.g. make an exact copy of this CD...). A couple of years ago I bought a Sony CD/RW that is also a portable CD player with headphones, car adapter etc. That might be worth a thought too: if I remember rightly I paid about £100 back then.
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MM: An external CD-RW is a no-no as USB 1.1 isn't fast enough to cope, certainly with DVDs and it'll be frusratingly slow on CD-Rs. Additionally, you may have problems if you ever need to boot from one.
I'd stick with the combo drive and like the idea of a clean install. It may simply be that you have an old, old video chipset that isn't fast enough to play the movie and the sound, in which case you'd be better off exchanging for a CD-RW only and losing the DVD facility.
There is also a possibility that your drive is taking the same resources as the onboard sound; but why that would happen with a new drive and not the old one, I really couldn't say. Do the "cable select" jumper thing before taking it back though.
As for PC World - having worked there, it tends to be that the people who know about products are the front line staff. The managers often (not always) come in from other retail jobs and their last job may have been selling clothes or parts in a VW dealer etc whereas the technicians at the clinic, or even the sales guys, actually have knowing about the product as their job description.
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MM: An external CD-RW is a no-no as USB 1.1 isn't fast enough to cope, certainly with DVDs and it'll be frusratingly slow on CD-Rs. Additionally, you may have problems if you ever need to boot from one.
Also, USB can be unreliable under Windows 98. I use an external USB Zip drive on a PC at work. It often freezes while copying large numbers of files. This causes the PC to freeze and the only way out is to switch off and back on. I'm pretty sure it's a combination of USB and the operating system rather than a hardware fault.
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I use an external USB Zip drive on a PC at work. It often freezes while copying large numbers of files
Is this a 250Mb drive by any chance? I spent a LONG time trying to diagnose an issue we had at work with all new internal and external zip drives where this type of lockup would happen. It turns out that there's a slight design issue related to the use of 100mb disks in 250mb drives which causes precisely this type of freeze. Delays of up to ten minutes have been recorded during which the drive appears to be still but is actually caching data. Any serious usage during this time plays hell with the process and causes a lockup.
The other thing is that those host-powered drives take the full 500mA allowed under the USB standard, and machines with lots of USB devices and weak hubs will often trip up as a result.
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I use an external USB Zip drive on a PC at work. It often freezes while copying large numbers of files Is this a 250Mb drive by any chance?...
Yes it is but not the sort that's powered by the USB port. I've only ever used 250 Mb disks. It was a lousy buy: an external CD writer would have cost about the same and the media would have been a fraction of the price.
It's often frozen for 10 minutes or more, by which time I'll usually have given up. When the drive is working correctly it takes less time than that for the files to be copied.
It's on a PC that's seriously overloaded with running programs (I've tried shutting some of these down to see if it makes a difference) and due for replacement in the next few months.
Curiously, a colleague has found that the drive seems to be more reliable if he copies and pastes the files, instead of dragging and dropping them in Windows Explorer. I don't see why this should make any difference but I'm going to try it myself.
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MM: An external CD-RW is a no-no as USB 1.1 isn't fast enough to cope, certainly with DVDs and it'll be frusratingly slow on CD-Rs. Additionally, you may have problems if you ever need to boot from one.
With respect David I have an external CD-RW drive right in front of me that is working absolutely fine on USB (I assume 1.1 given the age of the machine) and has been for over a year. True it's ropey on DVDs but then CD-RW drives tend to be I find: there's a clue as to why in their name. CD-R is at 4X, which I find is about as fast as you want to go for reliability and longevity, especially when saving software. I can't comment on how well Win98 would handle it as I originally ran this thing on WinME and now Mandrake Linux.
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Other thing that's just occurred to me - could it be that this new device and something else both have the same IRQ assigned?
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fb,
I've heard of IRQ sharing problems but have no idea what they are, why they are sometimes shared and why sometimes that is a problem.
I've looked at them in Tools/System but can't seem to copy/paste the list in here.
Anyway there is nothing at all that refers to a CD-ROM but there are a load of shared IRQs. What am I looking for that refers to the CD drive?
M.M
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I've heard of IRQ sharing problems but have no idea what they are, why they are sometimes shared and why sometimes that is a problem.
Tricky to explain without driving everyone off to the land of Nod! Basically, IRQs (or Interrupt ReQuests) are signals within the computer that something wants (or needs) to happen. If a device needs attention, eg a network card had detected a wakeup signal from the network, it'll send a signal down the IRQ line to the processor to let it know.
Because of a limitation hanging over us from the dark ages of computing (and witht he aid of a cheeky hardware cheat) there are only 16 IRQ signals available within a modern PC, and some of these are already reserved for use by essential parts of the computer. You'll find therefore that almost everything in your machine stands a good chance of sharing an IRQ with something else. This isn't always an issue (depending on the nature of the devices that are sharing) but if a particular component requires lots of attention and chucks data around like sweeties, it can cause problems for anything sharing the IRQ that needs to get a signal out.
Generally a modern OS will sort out IRQs for you, and it's only older expansion cards (mostly ISA ones) that can cause hassle. The ones to watch out for are often related to the soundcard - you may find that sound emulation modes and midi type devices may hog IRQs for no good reason, so you can often just disable these in the device manager. Symptoms of this often include a failure to boot windows (often with page faults and illegal insturctions all over the shop) or serious stuttering under heavy load from audio/video playback. It's rare that you should have to alter the existing settings though, as most new-ish hardware plays fair.
The bottom line is that you shouldn't really fiddle with the automatic settings unless you're sure that's the root of the problem. :)
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Any hardware that is given the same interupt request won`t work
it mostly happened on windoz 95.the fact music plays on it says.what my previous post explained.I have to admit I forgot to mention the sound card could be configured wrong.
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Just have to share this. Been looking round the Samsung Support Site for Europe.
In a case of the DVD playbck not running they say...
It is a constituent of a program or machine system. In a software viewpoint, it is a logically independent program part which is used when developing a program.
There are an object module, which connects and uses a linker, and a load module, which is connected by loader. This problem occurs due to those constituents when they are not driven in abnormal engagement.
So that'll be it then.
;-)
M.M
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I think I missed something there.Won`t alter the fact your pc is on the borderline of being able to use dvd.I doubt without upgrade you will.But that is my oppinion
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>>I think I missed something there..
Quite. It seems to have lost something in the translation!
I accept what you say about the DVD issue, that's why in 6hrs time I'll be at the PCWorld tech info counter asking to swap for a drive without DVD play.
M.M
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I've just taken out that CD-Writer drive and removed its associated programs. After taking out software I usually run Norton Utilities Windoctor to clear up the debris.
Doing this has reminded me of a missing file issue it has been alerting me to for the last few times I've done a check. It is connected with Instalshield and called "mscoree".
Has anyone any idea what this is and does it matter? The PC seems unaffected by its loss.
M.M
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mm: type mscoree.dll in google search engine and you will find your answer. please acknowledge you have read this post. thank you.
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Many thanks Dalglish. Found this info...
This message can safely be ignored. InstallShield is not really trying to use the file DotNetInstaller.exe without .NET Framework being installed. The DotNetInstaller.exe file is merely cached in the engine location for future use.
InstallShield installs DotNetInstaller.exe as part of its engine files, which is a .NET application that is used when a setup is installing .NET assemblies.
DotNetInstaller.exe will not work on systems that do not have the .NET Framework, but the file is cached with the InstallShield engine files just in case it is needed in the future when the .NET Framework is installed.
WinDoctor recognizes DotNetInstaller.exe as a .NET application that depends on the .NET Framework and reports its findings. WinDoctor's findings are technically correct, but InstallShield always checks for the Framework before trying to use it.
Or download and put the file in the C:\Program Files\Common Files\InstallShield\Professional\RunTime\0701\Intel32 folder
www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-files.shtml?mscoree
Found the file at the above link, downloaded into correct folder, ran Windoctor and the error is now not shown...one success today at least!
M.M
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Been following this one with interest about the resources needed to run DVD's. In 1997 my company gave me a Gateway notebook, bought in Kuala Lumpur for use with my job. It was 133mhz, 64 RAM and (I thin) a 4.3 Gb hard drive with a CD cum DVD ROM. I was doing a lot of long haul busines travel at the time so I used to buy DVD's in Hong Kong for use on the plane when I wasn't working on the lap-top.
It worked a treat. Later that year I bought another Gateway in Singapore for my daughter who was the 6th form and needed a PC for her schoolwork. That was basically the same but with 233Mhz chip.
That machine was happily playing DVD's up till last summer, when the disk drive finally died.
(Incidentally I should have bought another Gateway when I retired. I've had Compaq, Acer and Dell, all junk, forever going back to the shop, and none of which incidentally would play DVD's).
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Growler,
I guess you can be lucky as a one-off set-up. I've lost too much time already on this so far to risk trying for another make drive with DVD. If that too failed I can't think PCWorld would stand a second request to change...assuming they make the first!
M.M
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Well speak as you find...and I found the PCWorld guy very reasonable. He asked enough questions to know I'd tried to sort it myself and then offered a full refund or exchange.
I decided on a basic brand CDR/RW only with no DVD-ROM drive, also made sure it had Nero rather than Easy CD in case a software conflict was part of the problem. So I came out with a replacement, 20 CDRs and cash!
Fitted OK, loaded software and *everything* works OK...music, games, data..the lot.
I have yet to burn my first disc but expect it to go OK given the smooth operation of the rest.
Really do appreciate all the above info, it's been a good learning experience.
Special thanks to Kuang for that clear description of IRQs.
M.M
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M.M.
I was pleasantly surprised with PC World recently as well. I spent well over an hour discussing what pc to buy with one of the members of staff. He was very well clued up and certainly knew his stuff. Anyway, finally decided on the pc I wanted, only for a change in specification 4 days later - a free upgrade to a 17\" TFT monitor, whereas mine only came with a 15\" TFT. A quick call to them and I was informed that if a product reduces in price due to a sale, or additional hardware (such as a scanner or camera) becomes part of the package within 7 days of purchase, they have to honour that agreement and either refund you the sale price difference or give you the hardware. I took the original 15\" monitor back and swapped it for the 17\" one for free.
This certainly changed my opinion of PC World. Past experience had always been negative, not even dare asking a member of staff where the toilets were for fear of being given a wrong answer. I think it\'s the old stigma thing again - for years they had a poor reputation, but now it appears that the staff are more aware than they were previously. It\'s just going to take a long time to shake off the old reputation.
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