Jerky DVD audio only with user accounts

[SimonWindisch]

Hi there,

 

I have a teacher with a laptop that plays DVDs with jerky sound (and the video is jerky to match). When I sign on as an administrator I don't get the problem. If I sign on as another teacher then I do get the problem again!

 

It's an Acer Travelmate, running Windows XP SP3, I've defragged the disk to no effect.

 

We're using Cybershot PowerDVD to play the DVDs, sound is fine playing MP3s or CDs.

 

When I run Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Performance I can see that the Pages/Sec count for the two teacher accounts is going sky high as soon as I press play on PwerDVD, when I hit pause, it goes back to nearly zero. When I try the same with the administrator acount the same statistic runs between 20 and 60 percent when the DVD is played.

 

I ran a tasklist /v under all three user accounts, but I can't see any additional process running under the user accounts that the administrtor isn't running - the reverse in fact - wuauclt.exe and msmsgs.exe are running in the administrator account.

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

Thanks - Simon

[ajs]

I've seen something similar on some HP laptops.

 

What I ended up doing was turning down the hardware acceleration sliders in the properties of the audio device.

 

DVD playback was then perfect.

[Geoff]

DVD playback software needs admin rights for full video acceleration to kick in.

[FN-GM]

we had an Acer Travelmate 2420 doing the same thing. We changed the memory now it works fine

[SimonWindisch]

Thanks Geoff, do you have any more details on that?

 

Simon

[SimonWindisch]

Hi there,

 

In case anyone reads this in the future, I did a complete reinstall of Windows XP and it was fine after that.

 

Simon

[SimonWindisch]

If you run the windows performance monitor do you also get paging to 100% at the same time that the problem happens, as I did (admin didn't get that)?

 

And yes, Power DVD seemed to use the least resources.

 

Simon