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  1. Originally Posted by AEN007
    7March2009
    Greetings.
    every single post
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  2. It won't make much difference on the same physical drive. The head(s) still has/have to thrash around. However, having a separate partition on the same drive makes it easier to keep it unfragmented. Fragmentation is the primary cause of the heads having to seek to another part of the drive and this can cost you 100 to 250ms each time.

    BTW - I'm very pleased that you have persisted with your project despite the naysayers. Many years ago, I realised that if someone tells me something is impossible then I will be inspired to prove that it is possible. i.e., "It can't be done" is my greatest motivator.
    John Miller
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  3. Originally Posted by AEN007
    I also would to ask/know about partitioned HDD access speed.
    Can VLC access the avi files quicker on the smaller c: partition where VLC is installed
    instead of the larger d: partition?
    There should be very little difference at typical Xvid data rates. I'm not sure why you bother asking -- it's easy enough to test this for yourself.

    I happen to have an old 233 MHz P2 Dell laptop. I dug it out of the closet and ran a few tests with Windows XP and WMP 9. I was able to play a 320x176 25 fps Xvid (~600 kbps, packed bitstream, single b frame) AVI with MP3 (128 kbps CBR) audio file smoothly (~65 percent CPU load) with a small (Zoom 100 %) player window. But selecting the Zoom 200 % option caused CPU usage to max out and the video to get jerky -- about half the frames were dropped. Full screen was even worse, maybe 2/3 of the frames were dropped. The same video with no audio dropped the CPU usage to about 50 percent. Double size playback was pegged at 100 percent CPU. A 624x352 12.5 fps video was quite jerky.

    The implication here is that there is no video overlay ability and the CPU is doing all the scaling (on more up to date computers the graphics chips do the all the video scaling and the size of the window doesn't effect CPU usage). The resizing was done with a nearest neighbor algorithm so double and full screen playback was obviously pixelated. Your laptop's graphics chips might be different.

    MPCHC had slightly higher CPU usage, about 80 percent with the seek and status bars disabled. Enabling the seek and status bars incrased CPU usage to 95 percent.
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  4. Member AEN007's Avatar
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    Mar 2009
    Location
    Croatia
    Search Comp PM
    14January2011

    Greetings.

    Just a quick update to say that I have made UNBELIEVABLE progress
    in making this now 12+ year old laptop (now with XP) a multimedia machine.
    Some of you might want to flame the publisher or XP Myths here»
    http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html
    Especially regarding
    Myth - "Windows XP requires a high end PC to install and run."

    I found the low CPU usage mp3 player I needed to go with the SpecLab spectrum analyzer.
    The 24-bit to 16-bit video resolution tweak here»
    http://kadaitcha.cx/xp/performance.html
    also seems to be important to playing mp3s with SpecLab on this 12-year old laptop.

    I have also worked out numerous config settings for MPlayer (without the SMPlayer front-end)
    that allow me now to play almost any/every video in my collection.
    I make all new videos with specs that this 12-year old laptop "prefers",
    but I have LOTS of videos that I have made through the years with all kinds of specs ...

    CPU usage is usually around 50% when playing MultiMedia files.
    I put a 250gb HDD in this 12-year old laptop to accomodate my growing MM collection ...

    Anyone who wants to trash an old "useless" laptop could send it to me!
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