"Courtney Thomas" wrote in
nk.net:

The portable I'm tryin' to play the rars on is 1133Mhz and 524MB of
ram and Videolan will start to play the movie but soon stops. Is it
hardware and if not, what am I
missin' ? There's no error msg, just seems to run outta gas.



Hmm....a lot of what makes the movies bomb on any computer isn't to do
with processor speeds, any more. What it depends on, these days, is the
speed of the hard drives and their access times...and sometimes the load
on the motherboard, which is MUCH slower than the 1.2GHz processors,
slowing everything running down.

When the movie isn't running and you're not doing anything else...the
computer just sitting there....How much disk access do you see as
indicated by the little hard disk light?

Other things stupid Windows XP just can't help but do also brings
everything to a halt on DOS 5.2, too. I've found Windoze calling Mother
in Redmond, Micro$oft's overloaded servers, checking on updates, checking
to see if you stole the operating system, etc....every few seconds!
Windows, XP or not, doesn't "wait well". About anything can bring it to
a screeching halt, waiting for some obtuse hardware access. This makes
the movie balk or timeout and unwatchable.

Go to www.sysinternals.com and download TCPView and Process Explorer,
both for free. Install them as any program, and run them both. Set
TCPView to always run on top so you can see what's calling whom on TCP/IP
inside and outside the computer when it bombs. Windoze doesn't like it
if Mother doesn't answer its cries for help. TCPView let's you see it
call.

Start the movie playing but don't watch it. Bring Process Explorer up on
top so you can watch what programs are hoggin' CPU time or other nasty
delays going on. My Emachines AMD Athalon 64/3400+ beast with 1G of RAM,
goes berserk at odd times with hardware interrupts (second line on
Process Explorer's running programs list). Noone can tell me why. To
recover, I simply must reboot the system. Windoze, itself causes it
because it will do it with all other programs unloaded....even in safe
mode. If the hardware were at fault, simply rebooting wouldn't recover
overheating hardware interrupts that can sometimes, but not always or in
any particular sequence of events, consume over 70% of all the CPU time
just looping like crazy! Process Explorer easily exposes CPU hogs or
screwups like mine....

One of the CPU pigs on my system is EZ-Tune, which keeps monitoring my
big 21" Gateway LCD monitor to see if I've turned it from horizontal to
vertical and switches the video automatically. It monitors the monitor
way too often and hogs way too much processor time. The monitor's really
worth it, though....

Lots of things could cause the movie to crash....but it's mostly problems
with way too fast computers and way to archaic 5400 RPM laptop hard
drives that are too busy servicing too much of a load.



--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.