Mpeg-2 playback on harddrive has skips, but not on DVD,help

[NFL]

I'm just curious as to why my playback of the Mpg files or Muxed files on my hard drive has constant skippping. It only skips a split second, then stops, then comes back every few seconds. It's annoying enough to not watch a movie off of my hard drive. I thought at first it was my DVD Rom not playing the "burned" disk fast enough, but it does that when i'm playing a regular dvd as well. My hard drive is a Maxtor 40 GB, internal drive that i've had for about 1 year or so. I don't think it's my processor, being that I know an owner of a mom & pop computer store, and just upgraded my computer. My processor is a Pentium IV, 2.4 GH, and I have 512 MB, DDR Ram. Any help with this would be appreciated. Thanks

[babaji]

Is yer dvd-rom drive on you primary ide cable? ie is it on the same cable as yer HDD? It really needs to be on a seperate cable from the HDD. preferably as the master device.

[kayfam]

NFL,
Make sure DMA is enabled on both drives and if your playing it locally off the hard drive make sure you recently defragged the drive. And as the previous poster suggested make sure your DVD-ROM is on it's own separate channel as the master drive.

[NFL]

thank you both for the advice. I think a defrag would probably be pretty good right about now..lol. As far as the Ide Cables, I have the Hard drive on it's own seperate "ULTRA" ATA/Ide cable, and I have a dvd rom set to master as well as a cd burner set to slave on the other IDE Cable. When you say that I should have DMA set on both, does that have anything to do with "master" settings? If not, what does DMA mean, and how can I check to see if it is set on both my hard drive and DVD Rom? Thanks again for your help.

[kayfam]

NFL,
DMA = Direct Memory Access.
In the device manger go to IDE/ATAPI Controllers and expand the tree. Right click on the primary and secondary IDE channels, select properties and go to the advanced tab. From here you can enable DMA if it isn't already since XP enables it by default.

[NFL]

Kayfam, thanks once again for your reply. I am a computer novice, but I had a hunch (DMA) had something to do with device manager. I actually went in and checked for it under disk drives, I saw my hard drive but no DMA option. I have Windows XP, and went there to see if it was set like you said XP has it default to, and it looks like it is. It says on my Hard drive which I believe is my Primary Master, DMA if available, and below that Ultra DMA, Mode 5. It says the same thing for my DVD Rom. However, I know I have an UltraATA cable for my hard drive which has nothing else connected to it. It is the multi colored cable, I guess for better speed from my understanding. I don't have an Ultra ATA cable on my DVD Rom, which is my Secondary master, or my CD burner, which is my secondary slave. Those two are connected to the same regular IDE cable. Does that have anything to do with anything? One thing that I think may be odd is that in device manager when I click on my hard drive I get a location of 0 (0). Then when I click on properties for my DVD Rom, the location says the "exact" same thing, 0 (0). When I check my cd burner, it says location 1 (1). Doesn't 0 (0), stand for Primary Master? I thought I had read that somewhere before, but if that is the case, that seems very odd being that when I boot up, my bios detects my HD as PM, and my other two as SM, and SL. If you get a chance, please let me know what you think about this. I am going to defrag my hard drive now and see if that helps too. Thanks again.