Female needs help

[Guest]

Hahaha...speak for yourself there, "handsome"!
Although for 60...I'm told I'm "not bad"...

You are 9 years younger than I am.

[maineman]

Well Egoli, I hope you get some well-deserved rest.
Yup, this stuff sure is frustrating and can drive you crazy.
Don't give us a second thought...our only frustration is not being much help.
It's no one's fault...it's just the way it is.
You're there and we're not.

Your initial thoughts about a slow hdd and a slow burner being somewhat related were not incorrect.
Both devices can fall victim to slow data transfer speeds as the result of DMA issues.

A few more ideas.
In device manager, are you able to expand the
Intel(R) ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI Controller?
I suspect you have at least 2 controllers?

I hate to ask, but could you post a screenshot of your expanded device manager?

Have you defragged your hdd recently?
I'd do this regardless.
How about general housekeeping on your system.
Might be a good idea to run a couple of utilities such as:

CCleaner
and
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

Both are free and very good at their respective jobs.

You also might want to benchmark your hdd
You can use
HD Tune
or
Hd Tach
To run Hd Tach in Vista, you'll have to right click on the icon and run so as to be compatible with XP.

Hope this helps.

[Egoli]

Didn't know guys well into their 60s could be so tech-savvy :-)

1. I ran VSO Inspector: This time I tried it with a DVD that matches my laptop's region code and it didn't report any issues or errors, both for the 'surface scan' and the 'file test'. (Sorry, not sure what the exact terms in English are; I set it to install in English but it somehow defaulted to my OS language.) Here is the translated log session:

End file test
2009-12-28 16:30:48 Info Average reading speed: 1,27x
2009-12-28 16:30:48 Info Maximal reading speed: 1,48x
2009-12-28 16:30:48 Info Minimal reading speed: 0,38x
2009-12-28 16:30:48 Info OK: 8, Problem: 0, Error: 0
2009-12-28 16:30:48 Info 8 files checked
2009-12-28 16:03:34 Info Start file test
2009-12-28 16:03:34 Info End surface scan
2009-12-28 16:03:34 Info Average reading speed: 2,51x
2009-12-28 16:03:34 Info Maximal reading speed: 3,34x
2009-12-28 16:03:34 Info Minimal reading speed: 1,69x
2009-12-28 16:03:34 Info OK: 100,00%, Problem: 0,00%, Error: 0,00%
2009-12-28 15:49:43 Info DVD scanned from Sektor 0 - 1408006
2009-12-28 15:49:43 Info Total no of sectors: 1408006
2009-12-28 15:49:43 Info Start surface scan
2009-12-28 15:49:43 Info Layer: 1
2009-12-28 15:49:43 Info Capacity: 2,69 GB (1408007 Sectors)
2009-12-28 15:49:43 Info Mediia-ID: n/v
2009-12-28 15:49:43 Info Mediatype: DVD

2. My 'general housekeeping' is all right I think. I defragment from time to time and use anti-malware software (a-squared). I downloaded both suggested programs (CCleaner and Malwarebytes') and ran them, too. No major issues detected.

3. I've attached a picture of my expanded device manager. I cannot expand the AHCI Controller, which I believe is normal for an AHCI Controller (my limited google-knowledge talking here...).

4. I downloaded and ran HD Tune. I've attached the Benchmark results (not sure how to read this).

Do the VSO Inspector and the HD Tune test confirm that my Laptop is the issue here?

Egoli

P.S.: In case it is my laptop: it is still under warranty, but as I mentioned I live in a country where I don't speak the language so every sort of communication is difficult. Might be a while before I can take it in. Plus I wonder if 'slowness' will be accepted as a warranty issue. Not like anything is broken or not working (just slow).

[AGJ]

Your problem is the MATSHITA DVD drive on your laptop they are known to give problems with different region code DVDs than what the DVD drive is

[maineman]

Yup, as we've all said, the MatSHITa drives are just that.
The drive (hardware) aside, matshita drives are horrendous with respect to region coding (as AGJ said) and firmware support is poor to non-existent.
As I mentioned early on, I would strongly recommend an external drive or an internal one in an external enclosure if you wish to archive/bkup dvds.

I asked about your warranty not so much in terms of your laptop, but really with an eye to your burner.
I'm not sure how far you'll get with sony, but it might be worth a try.

Re: your hdd.
I know you said,
"I have in the past noticed very slow speed on especially my hard drive ".
I'm not seeing anything jump out.
Considering this is a laptop hdd with a spindle speed of 5400 and an 8 MB cache, nothing in the benchmark test results explain the poor performance you've seen previously and ? intermittently........or is the "slowness" consistent?
And you're right, the slowness is not gonna fly with sony.

[Egoli]

Maineman, hi,

I notice my laptop being slow especially when trying to make a backup to an external harddrive. It is ridiculously slow, so much that I've previously had to cancel my backups. The copying speed is usually only between 1.3 and 2.6 MB/sec.

Sony Vaio is so proud of their brand and then they use nonsense hardware like Matshita. Frustrating. But could this really be the reason that my DVDFAB full disk files end up being 'blocky'?

Egoli

[GregiBoy]

If, as you said, it is taking nearly 2 hours to rip a DVDto Hard Disk, tt most certainly could.

Taking this length of time would put all sorts of stress, heat especially, on the DVD drive which would result in incorrect reads, skipped reads, the whole catastrophe.

To be honest, all of my friends (About 5 of them) that have purchased Sony's regard them as a POS's (Piece Of Sh1t).

[GregiBoy]

As I think we said earlier, we think the only option for you (other than throwing the POS out of the window) is to buy a good quality USB external drive.

[maineman]

But could this really be the reason that my DVDFAB full disk files end up being 'blocky'?
Egoli

Yup, it sure could be. And unless you've got a stash of ancient media, no media is made to burn as slowly as the rip speeds you posted and that's probably what's happening.
Moreover, when the files are played from the hdd, they're no good anyway.

Sorry, but your burner is garbage.
I just hope you don't have some other problem, but let's look on the bright side here. Your laptop works.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.