My wife recently brought home a Dell Inspiron 530S with a Celeron 420 in it (supposedly the DVD drive in it didn’t work any more so the workplace got rid of it; not only does the system work but the DVD drive does too). I put it in my 2-year-old’s room in hopes of getting my 50″ back and don’t have to watch Power Rangers and The Grinch 50 times a day. I also put a Linksys 54g wireless card in it. It has Vista Basic and I installed TMT 3 on it to play ripped DVDs from the server. Sometimes playback is not quite smooth, and cpu usage is unusually high around 80% or higher. First I thought maybe the jitter had something to do with the wireless (although I used to use wireless on my other son’s years ago). So I put a disc in the DVD drive and playback was still the same. Then I thought maybe Arcsoft was not playing well with the G31/G33 Intel video, so I used the PowerDVD that was installed on the Dell and cpu usage was even a tad higher! Now the Celeron 420 is only 1.6 ghz and it only has 512mb of RAM, but I’ve had smooth DVD playback back to a 500mhz PIII and MX200 (actually even back to a 400 K6-2 and 64mb RAM and DXR3 card). So I don’t think it’s out of the question to ask this system for smooth playback. What’s your opinions as to why this thing is being this sluggish? I tried updating the chipset/video drivers too.
One more note: when I bring up Task Manager and look at “Processes” it shows uDigitalTheater (which is TMT) and cpu usage is about 40 to 50%. But when I go to the “Performance” tab it shows the usage more like in the 80’s. In the past of studying usage on other machines, these readings have been more similar to one another. I’m not sure why there’s a big discrepency in this case. Is Task Manager its self causing the extra cpu usage?
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