by Jim
Jan 19, 2006 7:26 AM
Ug. I was reduced to calling HP last night to resolve a problem with the DVD playback on my laptop. For the benefit of those googling this:
I've got a Pavilion dv4000, and the audio was choppy, or stuttering, when playing back a DVD. I have WinDVD 5, but Windows Media Player and WindDVD 7 trial versions did the same thing. Process Explorer told me that "hardware interrupt" was taking up 60% of my CPU, but the device manager didn't show any conflicts.
I figured out early on that having DMA working on the DVD drive is important, but I had "DMA if available" set for both devices in the Primary IDE channel setup. Device zero reported that is was using DMA, and I assumed that device 1 was unused on my machine. Not so! That's apparently the DVD.
I found HP's online help on the topic, but it said to delete the secondary IDE channel. Turns out I had to delete the primary also. When windows re-installs the IDE on restarting, it correctly sets the DMA mode for device 1, and all is well.
Now even if you get that far, who is going to delete something called the "Primary IDE channel" unless they're given explicit instructions to do so?