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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 :-)

Thanks for the quick responses, I did try messing around with the read-only settings for various folders / files but to no avail. The strange thing was that I tried to make the file in question 'read only' (was just curious to see if the program would still run or whether it did actually need write access) but it kept reverting back to being un-ticked!! Oh well, I'm not back at that school for another week so they'll have to wait or figure it out theirselves ;-) Thanks again Andy

Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum (and to this line of work!) & have looked around for help with my problem but found nothing, so apologies if I've missed something obvious. I'm having trouble running a Sherston package (Arcventure Egyptians) on more than 1 PC in a school I support. It is installed onto their NAS box and the 5 PCs needing access to it can all run it individually no problem. The trouble starts when trying to run it concurrently on 2 or more PCs. I get a message along the lines of "..unable to open \shared_filestuff.cxt as the file is open with write permissions by another user.." on all except the PC which launched the software first. I have checked through all the folders for any config / ini files which may need amending but can find nothing (other than details of save dir paths, etc, which are all ok). The teacher assures me that they have had it working like this before but I can't see what need amending to get it working (and the info in Sherstons packaging is of no use!!). It's probably something really simple & I'll look like a clown, but has anyone any suggestions to help me out? many thanks in advance, Andy