DMA on SATA DVD drive?

[vas]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm hoping somebody may be able to shed some light on a problem I'm having.

 

A laptop at one of the schools I support will not play DVDs properly (very jerky, broken sound, etc). The teacher says it was alright "before the new software" - this being a reference to the schools change to Win 7. I've tried other media players rather than her default Windows Media Player (such as VLC & Pot Player) but get the same problems. I've also searched through whatever settings I could think of to try & optimize playback but with no success.

 

However in Device Manager under the 'IDE / ATAPI controllers' section I found that the DVD drive (which I believe is a SATA drive) appeared to be listed in one of the IDE Channel tabs as PIO mode (the HDD was listed in the same tab & had the DMA tick box selected). If I tried selecting the DMA tick box for the DVD it wouldn't stay ticked (I think there was another entry under the controllers tab in addition to the Primary & Secondary IDE ones, which was related to SATA, but this had no selectable options).

 

Firstly, does anyone know if DMA is applicable to SATA devices (I seem to have found conflicting info when searching online), and secondly, could it have been the installing of Win 7 which has somehow messed this up - if so how do I re-enable it? Although the laptop is quite old it should be more than capable of playing a DVD (it's a 2GHz Celeron but has 2GHz of RAM).

 

Sorry if some of the details seem a bit vague!! - I cover about 16 schools fortnightly who all have very different set-ups - it's a bit difficult remembering who has what problems, etc :-)

[synaesthesia]

No, sata devices have nothing along the likes of DMA. Sounds like something's broken, or it could be an old laptop with first generation sata and dodgy controllers/drivers.