26th September 2001

Does your DVD playback have you hopping mad from frequent skips and stutters? DVD video can really stress a PC out if you don't have plenty of hardware horsepower. The most obvious thing to check is the overall condition of the disc (cleanliness). If that checks out, then move on to the hardware and software side. Background tasks that munch on your CPU and eat up RAM are often the culprit, so close down everything that absolutely doesn't need to be running. Sometimes it's a matter of finding the one task hampering performance, but it could be a culmination of several as well. High display resolutions also tend to slow down video performance, so a drop in resolution to as low as 640x480 with 16- bit colors might be all that's required to clear the road. As a last resort, you can try increasing the task priority under Windows 2k or XP, which will give the DVD software preferential treatment when competing for CPU cycles. In the Task Manager, right-click on a process and change the priority to High. Never set a process priority to RealTime, however. Doing so to a busy application could chew up so much CPU time that you likely wouldn't have any control over the system.