Choppy BLU RAY Playback - Dell Studio 1557

I have exactly the same problem with the same spec laptop.

I called Dell Tech support and they sent out an engineer to replace the Blu Ray drive but it still happens with the new drive.

I would be very interested to know if anyone has a solution for this.

yeah it spins up, then spins down again. It does this with DVDs too.

It also seems to do this as windows is starting up.

Maybe we'll solve this together!

If you have the BD in the drive , w/o PowerDVD running, does the PC try and access the disk every minute or so?

I actually have a full version of PowerDVD 9 and it still happens with that.

The full version of PowerDVD 9 is far superior than the PowerDVD DX supplied by Dell though. The Dell supplied one was incredibly slow and unresponsive.

I have emailed Tech Support, interesting for you that the problem hasnt gone away with a new drive..

I don't know if it would be solved using the full version of PowerDVD 9, as opposed to this weired version 8 supplied by Dell?

I think the core issue is the fact that it keeps spinning up and spinning down without PowerDVD open.

It probably just continues this behavior when playing a movie causing PowerDVD to temporarily lose control of the drive.

arcsoft total media 3 blu ray software does exactly the same, so its not a PowerDVD / software issue.

I'm in the UK and have also emailed the link to this thread to Dell tech support.

Back in the old IDE days, this behavior was due to a DVD drive running in PIO mode, but in the SATA world, that should not happen.

it bugs me because you get 1 minutes worth of wonderful Bluray, then its ruined, so you know this laptop CAN be good, but at the moment, its flawed

I was on the phone via remote connection to the laptop to Dell TS, no use at all, they dont know either

Yes I am also in the UK

Along the lines of what psprey has wrote i have being lookind into PIO and UDA today. Im pretty sure it maybe something to do with this. My drive was running in UDA 6 mode and i changed this to PIO. I found that after that there was still some choppyness but not to the severity it was before. It was still anoying and no where near to perfect but I think i could be on to something (even though Osprey beat me to it on this post) lol.

hiya, whwre do you go to amend this setting in win 7?

I did this by accesing the device manager through the control panel. under the tab on the left hand side saying IDE/ATA/ATAPI controllers select ATA channel 1 and click the advanced settings tab. this should sata ATAPI cdrom in the devices list and simply uncheck the box that says enable DMA

well to add insult to injury, the laptops now going back for 5-7 days as I now get a blank screen and 4 beeps on powerup...

great, £1000 one week old laptop, rubbish blue ray, wish I'd stuck with Acer