My old fella has a recycled PII (300Mhz, 128Mb, ATI Rage II). While it's not state of the art(!), it's not a bad little runner. I recently bought him an MSI 16xDVD, which seems to be running OK. However when I tried running PowerDVD but it the images are choppy if viewable and it struggles to kick out sound much of the time. Do any of you guys have an idea how to tackle this? Is PowerDVD asking too much? Can I tweak/ramp the performance up a bit? As an aside, I want to confirm that the PC IS running at 300Mhz - there is one of those useless Turbo buttons, which is even more useless than most - since it doesnt appear to make any difference at all! Is there a small util anywhere which can confirm the speed at which the PC is running? cheers Chris
For a PC like that, you'll most likely need a hardware MPEG2 decoder... I think RealMagic has a line of cards that can do the job, or you can pick second hand creative ones or realmagic ones from eBay
Hmmm,... that's not the answer I was hoping for... PowerDVD claims to only need a PII350, so I would have thought we would be covered...
Simply put, go into powerDVD's settings, and turn everything way back to minimal settings. It should work (I've gotten windvd to work on a 250mhz machine). And if you want to check your CPU speed, you can download a program called Everest (formerly AIDA 32). Click Here and just hit "Download" beside "EVEREST Home Edition v1.10" (either one, it's at your discretion of which you want to download). And that'll allow you to view information about everything on your computer, including CPU speed.
Malfoleo, Thanks for that... I might try a copy of WinDVD instead... Thanks for Everest - downloading now...
PowerDVD works perfectly on my old P2 machine (128MB, 8GB HDD, ATI RagePro GFX). It'll take pretty much any disk i throw at it. Just make sure the 'Use Hardware Acceleration' tab is unchecked - that can seriously hamper performance. Also check yr Hardware Sound Acceleration setting in DirectX. Occasionally, mine will default to 'emulated' which causes a weird chorus/flange effect on the sounds.
El_JimBob, Thanks. I havent checked the performance settings yet, so I'll have a look. It's reassuring to know it out to work.. Cheers
Ironic but true....! One use was for games that used to get frantically fast as CPU speeds increased! But most games after a certain period were programmed to calculate the current clock speed and adjust their speed accordingly. Maybe it had other uses as well... Certainly by PII times, they were nothing more than decorational!
Turbo was a feature of 486 processor i think so chances are on a PI or above it wont be connected to anything.
