Charlie has problems playing DVD video
I think I have a question on a subject you may have never touched upon. At least not to my knowledge and I’ve been reading and appreciating your newsletter for quite a long time now. I’ve been having a problem playing DVD video disks on my computer. The sound and video break up from time to time. When you recommended a free program (RAMRush) a few weeks ago that checks memory usage I installed it and I thought for sure that it would show me that I didn’t have enough memory (that’s what everybody always say) since I only have 512MB. As a bonus the program also displays CPU usage and to my surprise it showed that I’m using a solid 100% of my CPU when playing video’s on my computer DVD player. I have the same video file on my hard drive and when I play it from the hard drive it only uses 95 to 98% of the CPU and the video plays perfectly. I also tried playing the same DVD disk in my very old DVD player connected to my television set and it plays perfectly. The RamRush program also showed that I only use about half my memory while playing The DVD disk in my computer.

When the computer is idle with just a few programs running the background, my CPU usage is about 10% with an occasional spike to 20% and this is with the computer on for several hours. I have a VIA motherboard with a Pentium 4 -- 2.0 GHz processor. I also have 2 New DVD players and both act the same. Any help is welcome, Charlie

Our answer
Thanks, Charlie. One thing we want to mention here is that your question provides a lot of information, and that's a good thing because it helps us to answer your question correctly. You forgot to mention your operating system - but we're assuming you're using Windows XP, since you can't run Windows Vista or Windows 7 on such a small amount of RAM.

First do these two things:

1. Make sure your DVDs are clean and free of dirt, fingerprints, and dust.

2. Make sure your hard drive isn't almost full. Windows XP needs a lot of room to roam - so if you have less than a gigabyte of space free on your hard drive - considering removing some programs, files, etc. Running Windows with a hard drive that's 90% or more full, is an invitation to problems.

OK...after you've done those two things, read on.

You say you can play your videos from your hard drive without any problems, but when you play them from DVD they're not working correctly. When you play them from DVD they're cached as temporary files on your hard drive - and this caching takes up a lot of RAM and processor cycles. By playing them from your hard drive you're skipping the caching step - that's why they play better for you from your hard drive.

Just from reading your question we can tell you that the very best thing you can do for your computer is to add another 512MB of RAM. This would give you a total of 1024MB (1 gigabyte) of RAM. When you're caching 4GB of video, you're using a lot of RAM and processing power. If you don't have enough RAM, it forces Windows to carve RAM from your hard drive (this is called "Virtual Memory). So when you play video, not only is Windows caching your video, it is also working to create more memory from the free space on your hard drive. This is also processor intensive. And regardless of what RamRush says about how much memory you have left, there's not enough left for Windows to cache 4GB of video.

Adding more RAM to your computer is the one thing you can do that will absolutely improve you computer's performance. If you watch a lot of movies on your computer, you might want to consider installing 2GB of RAM, but make sure your motherboard supports that much RAM. If you visit www.crucial.com you can not only find out how much RAM your motherboard supports, you can also find out what kind of RAM you need. And adding RAM to your computer is easy - it will take you less than 5 minutes to install RAM. If you buy the RAM from Crucial.com - they'll send you easy, step-by-step instructions, so there is no need to take your computer to Best Buy or some other computer shop to have RAM installed; you can easily do it yourself.

You need to add at least an additional 512MB of RAM to your computer. Windows XP runs on 512MB of RAM, but many people do things on their computer (play games, work with graphics, databases, watch movies, etc.) that require a great deal of memory. Add more RAM to your computer. We think you'll find your videos and movies play much more smoothly from your DVD players.