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DVD Video lockup

I am running Windows XP Media Center Edition on a seven year old Sytemax system. I have a 40 GB hard drive, and 354MB of RAM. The hard drive has only 6 GB of space left on it that is available. I have two external DVD players, one is read only and the other will write DVDs. I am having a problem with playing DVD movie disks that is nearly constant now, but an occasional movie disk plays OK. I have the problem no matter if I'm using Windows Media Player or the Interactual DVD player program. The movie plays just fine until about half way through it. Then the system locks up and nothing will unlock it except turning the power off. I have tried using first one of the DVD players, and then the other one. The same problem appears no matter which player I'm using. Could this be related to insufficient RAM? And if so, why would the video be OK until about half way through the movie?
Puff
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posted by puffmaru

This post has been closed to further replies by an administrator

I am not sure, but I think is in not having enough Memory, but I shall leave this to the experts....

Come on guys step on up!
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posted by Debirae
about 1 month ago
try upping to at least a gig...you need memory for buffer...and you are way down on open space for your hard drive...the hard drive is sometimes used as memory space too..in fct you are so short it may be hard to defrg it...remember ...15 per cent free is the minimum...try getting memory and an external drive...*frys and i think it is office depot just had 500gb externals for 90 bucks*...
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posted by amond
about 1 month ago
WinXP needs 512 Mb of RAM to run. So you are already using part of your swap file on your hard drive. As you play your DVD you will be using more of it until you have a buffer over run. and the program locks up. and you usually have to reboot to clear the memory.
You need atleast a Gig. of RAM. And another hard drive wouldn't hurt. Frys.com and Newegg.com have good prices on both.
another route would be to upgrade your system to either Fedora Linux, Ubuntu Linux, or FreeSuSE Linux. All of which will run on your current system and do what you want flawlessly without having to buy any new hardware.
Good luck.
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posted by Kirk511
about 1 month ago

I was going to suhggest that you try and increase the virtual ram but since you have about run out of space, the previous suggestion made about you getting another larger hard drive may be the solution also.

You could also uninstall things that you do not need on your hard drive as well.
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posted by JeremiahLyles
about 1 month ago
I had a similar problem and upped the ram to 1 gig and it went away....but I also have a 120 gig or so hard drive which helps a lot too...*S* so just go for it...
photo of utahjim
posted by utahjim
about 1 month ago
Thank you for all the replies. They do make sense. I will first try increasing the RAM to 1GB. If that doesn't do it I will add a much bigger hard drive. I really need that anyway.
Puff
photo of puffmaru
posted by puffmaru
about 1 month ago