Shane, are you capturing to the same drive your OS is on? If so, try capturing to a separate clean drive. Be sure it is defragged.

Jerry

I got Sysoft Sandra, good program. What kind of tests should I run? Should I generate some type of report on it and post it here?

I would start at the Information Modules and go through each one. No need to post all the reports here (they are lengthy). Also, each module may have several parts to it. Start with the Summary, it should tell you a lot of info. All the tests warn you if it finds something that may be strange, and what to do to try to fix it. Check the motherboard, memory, cpu; basic core system pieces.

Then got to benchmarks and run a few of them, make sure you select a similar CPU for comparison. That should tell you if your system is running like other systems of the same configuration.

Keep in mind, also, it has been years since I've captured on a Win2000 system. MS may have patched it up so bad that it is incapable of capturing without dropouts.

I have been working on a server program running on Win2K for the past 8 months at my day job, runs like a dog. This past week they switched it to Win2003 server, and it runs like a champ.

If your Win2000 systems are patched to the hilt, and you feel adventurous, reinstall to base Win2K, apply say a couple of service packs back, and see if things run better.

Is anyone working on Win2000 fully patched and are capturing successfully?

I've got a Win2K system here, pretty certain it's got all the latest patches, no problems last time I captured with it, which is a while ago.

Even 386s will capture OK, there's got to be something seriously awry to get problems capturing DV.

I'm not running much in this system. Just the system itself, the hard drive, and floppy drive

This really suggests he is using only one hard drive, with OS and capture and video files all on the same HD. As TeeTime suggested a few posts ago, this should be eliminated by adding a new drive.

I did some realtime capture to my XP laptop this morning and had a lot of dropped frames. I'm not sure if this was the cause but I noticed when Igot back to the office that i forgot to disable my Microsoft Search Desktop which has a background indexing service. If you have any disk indexing service running be sure it is turned off.

Jerry

Yes, I have mentioned earlier above that I only have one hard drive and that is all I have room for unless I put in a second one in the one five inch bay or in place of the floppy. These Shuttle machines are small. The hard drive is a 320 GB S-ATA Seagate. Everything brand new. Also, I do not have anything else running or installed on these machines. These are bare machines only for Vegas and several other video editing tools and nothing else. I keep anything else extra that could be running in the background disabled or uninstalled.

I do in fact have all the latest updates and patches installed as well. I had to have all the service packs installed otherwise I couldn't get the full capacity of the hard drive.

I'm guessing I should probably get XP64 and just get the full use out of my 64 bit processor and see if that helps the problem. I don't see why only using 32 bit on this brand new machine would be a problem, though, but I keep thinking that this has to be it since I've ruled everything else out and have everyone here stumped. I don't know what else I could do. It just seems like the computer isn't processing as fast as it's supposed to. Since it's doing it in both machines it suggests that it's something consistant with the way they are both running since they are both the same machine and set up the exact same way.

It seems I've narrowed the problem down some more. I disconected the SATA hard drive and connected an IDE hard drive and installed Windows 2000 on that without any updates. Capturing worked perfectly there. So, I decided to reformat my SATA hard drive and start fresh yet again and try it out without any Windows updates. Captures terribly with the SATA drive, even without the Windows updates. It must be something with the SATA with these computers. For some reason the SATA runs slow with these machines, I don't get it. It sucks because I bought two brand new SATA 320GB Seagates here. I'm still holding out hope that there is some way to tweak this in the bios. Anyone have any ideas based on this new finding?

Sounds like a common problem with the Shuttles, since 100% of yours act the same. Check their website or google to see what the problem may be. Glad you narrowed it down. That does suck.

Actually, now that I think of it, my WD Raptor C: drive is SATA. No problems here. ASUS mb. Intel P4, 3.2Ghz

There have been lots of books, tutorials, and Internet postings where they say unequivocally that for good video capture and editing performance you need a physically separate drive that does not have the OS on it. (By drive, they really mean physically separate, not just a partition).

If you are getting ok results with the IDE in standalone and not the SATA, then it does sound like more than just this. Hopefully that problem will get resolved! Maybe a bios update can help. And try with different SATA cables.

That said, I think you'll still find that (assuming you have drives that work well in the system) you'll still ultimately get better capture and edit performance if you do your video work on a separate drive.

Shane - is the Shuttle running in the "Laptop" power mode? That could be your whole problem.

Steve M.