Hi, I just bought a used Compaq Presario 1694 laptop (AMD 450Mhz). It has a dvd drive as original equipment. The laptop is running XP Pro.

I cannot get the dvd drive to play movies without horrible skipping. I am pretty sure the root of the problem is dma mode. I have uninstalled and reinstalled my secondary ide channel several times. The dvd drive is recognized as secondary master and sets to dma mode. When I put in a dvd and the laptop reads it, the secondary master switches to pio mode. I have tried editing the registry too.

I read that XP will set the mode down to pio if it gets too many read errors. I have also read this can stem from using a 40 wire ide cable on a desktop instead of an 80m wire.

Since this laptop came with the dvd drive and movie playback capability I am assuming the cable is udma capable.

I swapped in a dvd drive from a dell laptop that plays movies fine. The result was the same...drive installs as dma but degrades to pio when dvd is played.

I bought this laptop for my daughter and DVD playback was one of the main things I wanted.

All I can think of is either the cable is bad or the motherboard has problems. If anyone has advice please let me know...and I could also use a link to a vendor that sells a compatible cable so I can try a new one.

Thanks in advance for any and all advice!

MrArcade

Welcome to PCHF mrarcade,

There are a number of suggestions here: http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm - have you tried them all ?

I have tried all the things listed there. One thing might still be an issue, I wanted to verify the secondary ide was set to dma in the bios, but I cannot seem to change any drive settings. I assume it is auto and cannot be changed. If I am wrong, please let me know.

A little more info...when I uninstall the dvd and let it reinstall...it says hardware found...then lists the dvd. A little after that it says hardware found ...then lists cdrom. When I open windows explorer it shows D: as cdrom instead of dvd.

The drive is definitely a dvd and will browse dvd and recordable dvd media...but not rewritable dvd media. I just thought it odd that it shows up as a cdrom in windows explorer.