Is this normal?

I just got an FW series laptop with 4GB ram and a 2.4 Ghz processor.

Well i have it for two days and when i try to watch a downloaded 4GB blu ray quality movie it stalls every couple of minutes even with no other programs running?

Do i return this laptop immediately?
Why shouldnt it be running smoothly?

 

i would say its your software - not the computer....

first i would make sure the cpu isn't being downclocked like if your on power saver mode and the cpu isn't set to 100%. irrelevant if your plugged in.


but its probably your software....i know nero showtime is quite good at that, i always watch hi def movies on that and it runs smooth - while quicktime, will skip for no reason on mine....and im running the p8600 (2.4ghz) and 4GB also

 

Ok, i am running it on VLC, never had a problem with it with 700MB movies, maybe its just that VLC cant handle 4GB movies, dont know

 

You must check that you can decode your movie properly: do you have the correct codecs installed already?
Try with media player home cinema (here http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/) if not 'cause it has integrated hi-def codecs.

 

If you just got it, and it has Vista, be patient. For the first couple of days, Vista will reorganize the hard drive and index most of the file, which slows it down majorly.
Leave it on overnight the first day, and it should improve immensely.

After this, do a defrag. It'll be needed.

Also, if you haven't already, get a 512 MB to 4 GB fast memory stick or SD card, and plug it in permanently, and enable ReadyBoost. It will work as a shadow for the swap file, trying to cache all the small files where access time is more important than transfer speed. Note that you need a fairly fast card to be able to enable it, though. Most older MS Pro cards work, while newer ones won't unless they're special "high speed" cards. (Sony, Lexmark and Sandisk have saved costs by binning their cards and selling the slower ones as regular ones.)

Finally, if you have a virus killer, you might want to exclude the directory you put movies in, to prevent it from scanning them, slowing things down. Oh, and if you installed a virus killer yourself, make sure you disable the built-in real-time-scanning in the Windows Security Center, or every file will be scanned twice, which truly hurts speed.

 

@ Biggamer3...
First three things I think of when reading your issues is this...
1) Do you have proper codec?
2) Movie file you DLed is corrupt.
3) Can you hardware handle this kind of Hi Def movie?

I use VLC player also for my DVDs. It should play the movie fine. Do you have the latest, most up-to-date player?
Try DLing CCCP codec pack and installing that. That's my fav of all the codec packs. I can play just about anything with those installed.
You may have conflicting codec issues? Did you install all kinds of diff players? Did you install several diff codec packs? You may need to uninstall them all, then re-installing just one pack.
What kind of vid file did you DL? Where from? This info may help with your prob. Give me a PM if this part is top secret (~_^)'wink.

 

Readyboost wont do anything when you've got 4GB of RAM already.

Readyboost on a USB drive is useful if you have 512MB or 1GB of RAM.

 

Try it with CoreAVC.

 

If you put your movie in externel HD it may happen.Try to put that movie and play in C drive and see what happen.

 

definitely try that coreavc

 

Thanks guys for the replies, turns out it was a problem with VLC, apparently, it doesnt handle 4GB files very well and when i tried it with an 11GB download of The Dark Knight in 1080p (from Mininova) it could barely play more than 10 seconds without going haywire)

So i downloaded a codec pack someone mentioned, i forgot which one and played it with Windows Media player and WALA, it plays the 4GB and 11GB files PERFECTLY and boy does a 1080p movie look nice on the FULL HD Screen.

Still i got a problem now again i tried playing Command and Conquer red alert 3 and high the highest setting for graphics, everything to the fullest the game seems to be playing a little slower than on the lower graphic settings.
Shouldnt i be able to run the game on maxed settings with the good gamind card and all?

 

I think its spellt voila ;-)
(Don't take offense)

 

:wink:

 

Thanks
It is spelled or has spelt , isn't it?

 

Getting back on topic thanks for reading my post and not offering any help

 

Wrong. A common misconception about ReadyBoost is that it adds to the RAM. It doesn't. It mirrors the swap (paging file), so when the OS needs to return something that's swapped out, it can benefit from the much lower seek time of the solid state media.

Vista will (like most Unix systems) use swap even if you have boatloads of RAM. The reason is that when you have pages of a file that haven't been accessed for days, it makes sense to flush them out to disk and use that RAM for disk cache instead. This is why in Vista (and most Unix systems) the speed improves after the system has been up for a while -- unlike older Windows and Linux versions.

What readyboost won't help with is benchmarks, but what it will help with is situations like when you restore a window that's been minimized for a long time. Chances are then high that the memory has been swapped out and re-used, and if parts can be swapped back in from SD/MS instead of a HD, it helps.

Yes, it helps more when you don't have a lot of RAM, simply because then the system swaps more. But it will help no matter how much memory you have, just less the more RAM you have.

Take a look in the task manager. The amount of paging file space used can be mirrored by ReadyBoost. If you keep a near constant amount of paging file space used, that's the ideal amount of SD/MS/USB space to use for ReadyBoost too.

 

Windows can't use more than 3GB of RAM actively on a 32Bit OS.
(Yes there are some ways in which it does use more)

So Using readyboost on a 4GB system shouldn't do anything.

 

Correct. (Or, to be more precise some 3-3.5 GB, depending on how much graphics memory and other memory mapped into the system tables you have).

That doesn't follow. ReadyBoost is not RAM.

ReadyBoost is swap, or "paging file" as it's known as in the Windows world. Or, to be more precise, it's a mirror of parts of your paging files on disk. Swap is not constricted by how much RAM you have (not anymore, that is. On very old OSes like SunOS 2.2 and Windows 9x, swap shared the memory map with the OS, so you could only have a certain amount of RAM+swap).

As I said before, take a look at the Task Manager. Check "Physical Memory" and then look over on the right and check "Page File".

 

OK...
But I thought Readyboost was for RAM not for the pagefile...

(Mines is 1209MB at the moment - of 6325MB possible)

 

A common misconception. Most people don't even have a notion of what a page file is ("most people" call the computer case a "hard drive"...), so it's not surprising that people have thought of it as such.

In that case, adding a 2 GB fast MS or SDD and using it for ReadyBoost would be a good thing for you. The 1209 MB of swap space being used would then be mirrored to ReadyBoost (in the background, using spare cycles), and whenever something small was needed from the page file, Windows would likely get it faster from the card than the proper page file, due to the near instant access time.

A high speed 2 or 4 GB MS Duo is now around $25-35, and I'd recommend it.

The reason why the OS isn't just using it for swap directly instead of a HD file is twofold:
1: Writes to a MS/SD/USB is much slower than to a HD. So swapping out would be much slower.
2: The user might jerk out the card. If he does, there's no worries if the swap is still on HD. If it wasn't, the system could easily become inoperable.

The smart thing is how Vista first writes to a HD page file as usual, and then when there's spare time in the background, copies the data over to the ReadyBoost cache on the MS/SD/USB. If the ReadyBoost cache is smaller than the Paging File, it will only hold the most recent entries in the paging file, but those are the most commonly used. So even a small 512MB MS will have a positive effect. Since it always works in the background with spare cycles, it won't slow your machine down. It may impact battery life slightly, though, so you might want to eject the card when working on batteries.

 

I think someone once dug out a comparison on which Readyboost seemed to have no effect upwards of 2/3GB...

Anyway - battery life - that is waht I need when I'm not at home, and the 0,1s I may get out of using a card isn't worth it to me.

 

I've seen one "test" like that. And giggled more than a little, because the author was all the way looking at speed and not latency. Of course the speed won't be boosted much this way, and especially not with added RAM, which reduces the amount of overall swapping. But the latency when fetching something from swap will benefit a great deal.
Much like using a smart network card with an onboard CPU (like a 3com 990 or Killer Nic) won't reduce your transfer speeds much, and especially not if you have a high amount of bandwidth and a fast machine. If what you measure is how long it takes to download an ISO, you're going to be sorely disappointed. If, on the other hand, you play games or use NFS mounted home directories, you may be pleasantly pleased.
What you should be measuring in both cases is latency, easiest seen as responsiveness when the system is busy.

In the case of ReadyBoost, an example of a noticable benefit is if you minimize windows, then do something intensive like playing a game, then restore the windows. Even with 4 GB of RAM, the memory needed for redrawing the windows is likely to be swapped out, and restoring the windows might take several seconds for each window. With enough ReadyBoost memory to match your swap size, that will be almost instantaneous.
Another noticable benefit is when the HD is busy, like when defragmenting, virus scanning, doing a backup or Vista reindexing. Then doing other things at the same time is painful, regardless of whether you have 1 GB or 4 GB of RAM. Here, ReadyBoost helps quite noticeably.

Your system becomes more responsive, with less latency. But it won't be much faster. Especially not for benchmark type applications, which are designed to not cause swap-outs and swap-ins, because that's not what's tested, and swapping tends to blur out any differences between score sets -- if something takes 30 s versus 35 s when avoiding swapping, that's a significant difference, but if it takes 750 s versus 755 s with swapping occurring, the difference becomes insignificant. What ReadyBoost does is not like reducing the 35 s to 30 s, but more like shaving off those 5 seconds from 755 s, and not spread out evenly, like a slightly faster HD or CPU would do, but in sporadic chunks. Which is precisely why it becomes noticeable.

The only time I can see ReadyBoost as not being beneficial is if you have a SSD HD. Then you already reap the speed benefit of faster swap-ins.

 

Ah, OK. Well, I never end up playing games with minimized WIndows...

And about Computer behaviour while defragmenting - although one shouldn't, I've been defragmenting & doing stuff - I did not notice any slowdown...

Anyway. I can't give you rep need to "spread it around"... Well explained!!