So for the last two times that I've worked on my sister-in-laws laptop I've been under a lot of pressure, with a little amount of free time. The first time we were getting married, so all I was able to do was my basic round of tweaking and tuning. I didn't want to get to into the modifications of services and then have her get back to CA with it not working.

The more recent time was when Amelia was born and she came out to help for three weeks. Most of my old modifications were present and running fine, so I did a recheck up and even popped the hard drive out to scan it on my computer. Everything was pretty much set, and it was running as good as you could get XP on a laptop with 256mb or ram (I upgraded her to 768 actually as a thank you for coming out). There was however one lingering issue, that I had not been able to fix either time...the DVD player was skipping.

Now when I say skipping, I mean the video and audio were lagging every half second almost like some type of bottle neck was stopping it from getting the data off the dvd quickly enough. Apparently she'd had the dvd drive replaced a few times by the help desk of whatever big box store she bought it from, and it fixed it for a while but the problem always came back. I tried messing with audio codecs, video codecs, shared video memory sizes just about everything I could think of. I even check Compaq's side about dvd playback issues or patches, but didn't find anything.

Then I checked the IDE channel for the DVD drive...and sure enough it was set to PIO mode instead of DMA. No matter what I did I couldn't get it to change to DMA mode....so in the device manager I deleted the secondary IDE channel and rebooted. Two minutes later I was watching a DVD with no skipping or problems at all.....and now that I knew what to look for, there was an IDE channel firmware patch on Compaq's site after all.

So until I hear otherwise, I'm considering this problem solved and it only took me two years.