Re: Problem with Presario

Simon wrote:
Hi,

I'm new to the group and to owning a laptop so forgive the call for
help out of the blue!

I have a Compaq Presario 1200 which I believe has a Celeron 550 CPU,
and had 64mb of 144 pin in it when I bought it. The machine would not
play MP3's from hard drive or thumb drive without jittering like
crazy, so I added another 64mb of RAM and it's less jittery now but
still not perfect.
Reading around forums on the net it seems people have managed to play
MP3's on prentium 1 machines with less RAM than I have and even 486's
(sometimes overclocked but.. hey!! It's a 486).

The OS is Windows ME (groan... but it was what was on it when I
bought it second hand and has a ME Product Key sticker). This was
re-installed just before I bought it so that the machine wasn't
cluttered.
I have no other processes running, no antivirus, antispyware, IM ...
nothing (offline machine).

Any ideas, please, of why the MP3's jitter, or any possible tweaks or
fixes as I know the specification is far higher than the minimum
needed for the job.

Many thanks in advance,
Simon.

I have a HP AMD 1.2GMZ desktop that is terrible for videos (streaming
and DVD) and some MP3s (it depends on the bit rate). I fought it for
years and replaced sound cards, video cards, etc. and nothing changed.
Heavy use of the hard drive was the worst, but it couldn't play DVDs
very well on its own.

My Toshiba 2595X-DVD laptops are like that too. Both maxed out with
192MB of memory with a Celeron 400MHZ. One has Windows 2000 installed
and can't play streamed video better than 100k. And the other one has
Windows98SE installed and plays them well past 700k. See what a
difference an OS can have on the same machine?

It is my guess that some machines are just terrible for some of these
tasks, while the specs are good enough to be able to handle it. And
while I believe Windows XP runs media the smoothest out of the other
Windows OS, I don't think I would try it on that machine. But if you
would like too, then give it a shot. You can use anybody's Windows XP
install disk and have 30 days to play around with it before you have to
activate it. And in that case, buy Windows XP if it works out for you.

I don't know Simon, you don't want to spend a lot of money on a machine
like that. But more memory and a faster HD will help, but most likely
won't cure the problem. Luckily laptop manufactures are dropping prices
on laptops and you can get a decent one for like $500 nowadays.


.

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