I just bought a new laptop last year - a 1Ghz AMD Athlon Compaq with 256MB of RAM and onboard video. I have a bunch of dvds that I converted to SVCD that I'd like to watch on my laptop, since it's very portable. However, I've noticed that my laptop doesn't particularly like SVCDs.

When I try to play an SVCD, it works fine for a few minutes. Then, at certain times in the movie, the SVCD will just lock up, forcing me to force-quit whatever program is playing it. I've tried different pieces of software to play SVCDs, including WinDVD, PowerDVD, Winamp, Windows Media Player, and that free one (the one available for all platforms...I forget what it's called). All software has the same problem - it freezes at certain points in the movie.

My guess is that the movie has a garbage sector at these points where it freezes. However, isn't there a way to skip over these garbage sectors? My DVD player at home does it fine. Also, I don't recall having any similar problems on my main desktop PC. The desktop is obviously a lot faster, but still, isn't 1Ghz and 256MB RAM plenty for just playing movies?

I don't understand what the problem could be...maybe someone else knows how to solve this. If you know, PLEASE post here as soon as possible. I'm leaving for a 3-week trip to India soon and really would like to bring my laptop to watch some movies on the way there.

Thanks,
Sheil