Gaming MY Laptop's DVD Drive

[Dark_Lord Malik]

My Laptop's DVD Drive has gone slow. It is slow when copying files from DVD to HDD or when playing movies etc sometimes it lags a lot playing most DVDs. When i tried checking my speed using Nero Disc Speed tool i was only getting a max speed of 1.2x. What the hell has happened it was fine some weeks ago and was pretty fast, I copied a lot of DVD's and all had average speed of 6 MB/sec with peak to more than 7 mb/sec.
Please can anybody help me to know if there is anything wrong with my drive. The Laptop is brand new HP DV6700 Pavilion Notebook and it has a TSST corp DVD rom. I purchased it a month and half ago. I don't know what happened to the DVD Rom. I remember that i was copying alot of DVDs on that particular day and suddenly while copying a DVD this happened that the copying became slow.
Any help will be greatly appreciated please guys so help me in this problem. Is it hardware problem or software problem. i was thinking that maybe it is software problem because when copying DVDs the PC comes to a crawl like it is using lots of resource and i can't run shit e.g even if i run some video it plays choppy and lags even though i have a 2 GHZ Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM. My Laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium installed but i installed XP on it for gaming etc. I think it may be XP Problem cuz it happened after i installed XP and on the 3rd day of it. Vista never had any problem for more than 2 weeks of usage.

P.S my english is not that much perfect so i am sure i may have made lots of mistakes,

 

[p1ngpong]

Have you tried using a DVD lens cleaner?

Also with a brand new machine its always worth taking advantage of the warranty to get things fixed while its still free!

 

[Dark_Lord Malik]

No i haven't tried one.
i am afraid to use one as i think they may damage my DVD Drive lens and how can it get dusty when i have only used it for a month.
i will try my warranty now. Thanx for the tip.

 

[Strider]

Heavens, no. Don't use a lens cleaner. It'll more likely damage the drive. Just yesterday I read some advice from Philips not to do that (you could just blow dust off it).

Anyway, since you're not aware anything happened, I have an idea. Maybe it's a virus scanner or something, that tampers with drive access? Have you installed like that?

 

[p1ngpong]

Yeah maybe a lens cleaner isnt such a great plan lol

Stick with the warranty, its a brand new machine.

Would a virus scanner interfere with dvd reading speeds? Ive never heard of that before!

 

[Dark_Lord Malik]

Ohhh yeah man thanks not going to try a DVD Lens Cleaner now.
Yes i have a Antivirus installed if that is what you mean. But i didn't knew that it can interfere with my Drive Speed. If i uninstall it will it solve my problem?
I really need to solve this problem cause it's getting on my nerves. Not only reading but writing speed is also stuck at 1.2 x which is so slow to write a DVD of 4 GB length it takes an whole hour.
Please help me man and the computer becomes slow no matter if i write a DVD or read/copy a DVD.

 

[nico445]

Try Reinstalling windows first. then go for warranty if that doesn't work.

 

[Dark_Lord Malik]

The problem is that i have a lot of important data that i need to backup first and my DVD drive is so slow to write that. The total Data is 120 GB and it will take a lot of time to backup it on DVD and i have no other PC etc or any other way.

Ohhhh and buy the way i have only just one partition and i have all my data on that partition and i don't want to bother making another one since it is a Laptop HDD.

 

[p1ngpong]

Hey man I was on another forum and someone had the same problem as you, someone told him to do this which fixed the problem, maybe it will help you.


"I've seen this problem before.

Go to your control panel and choose "System"
On the hardware tab, choose "Device Manager"
Under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
double click on Primary IDE Channel or
right click and choose properties
On the advanced Settings tab,
set the Tranfer Mode to DMA not PIO
Do the same for Secondary IDE Channel

If you're wondering,,,
PIO = Programmed Input/Output
DMA = Direct Memory Access
In PIO mode there is a program that runs inside your drive that acts as a middle man and slows things down. DMA will bypass that.

It should take around 15 minutes to burn a full DVD at 4x."

Hope that helps!

 

[Devante]

Any negative effects of not having PIO enabled?

 

[Dark_Lord Malik]

Nope it didn't Help. I also tried removing Antivirus.

Googling for a solution a person mentioned that flashing a new firmware has resolved his problem.

Now is there any risk etc in flashing a firmware and can anyone provide me with a guide and the FW file etc i don't know if it is illegal but if it is than please PM me.
Thanx and ohhh by the way my laptop is HP Pavilion DV6700 with a TSSTcorp CDDVDW TS-L632N DVD RAM Drive.

 

[Dark_Lord Malik]

I am getting tired of waiting so i am gonna bump this topic. Any help here please.

 

[Strider]

Sorry the hint to antivirus didn't help. For anyone asking, of course any permanently active virus scanner like applications slow your access times down! In some cases, those can hang (read errors and the like) and even lock up systems. But that didn't seem the case here.

So then I'd go for the hardware and warranty.

 

[Dark_Lord Malik]

I solved my problem. Yippppppeeeeeeeeeee. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHH!

Can't stress my happinesss enough. So basically i think what happened was that i had a virtual drive installed (Alcohol 120%). I removed it and then i uninstalled my Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel and my DVD Rom driver. I then restarted my PC and waited for them to install again and to my surprise when i went into the properties of Primary IDE Channel it was written Multi Word DMA Mode 2.0 before that it was written PIO Mode only. So basically that solved my problem heaps of thanks to P1ngPong for the tip. Thanx 2 all of you guys too for ur tips and suggestions.

Topic should be closed now.
Me Happy