I'm on a business trip again, with only my trusty laptop accompanying me. There not being any good movie on the plane, I start watching a DVD on my laptop, but the image stutters and is choppy. Now in the hotel I find the time to fix it.
First I thought it was a physical defect on the disc or the drive, but using another disc has the same problem, and the drive doesn't look damaged at all. A Google search brings up a hit with a reference to "DMA mode", and that is a problem I had before, so I know what it is, and how to fix it. Basically its a peculiarity of Windows: Any IDE device can run either in slow (but safe) PIO mode, or in different levels of the much faster DMA mode. But every time Windows encounters a problem, it automatically switches the device one level lower. And you can't prevent that, or set the level back up. Once Windows arrives at PIO mode, the device is too slow for watching DVDs.
To fix it, you need to go to the Device Manager, select IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, select the secondary IDE channel (provided that this is the channel the DVD drive is on, which it should be), and fearlessly select uninstall. Then reboot the computer, at which point Windows will automatically reinstall the device. Then go to the Device Manager again, double-click on the secondary IDE channel, and in the Advanced Settings switch from "PIO only" to "DMA if available". Reboot again and the drive is fast again. Complicated, but works.
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