You can find tips and tweaks using SiSoftware to tune up your system:

www.3bsoftware.com/sandra

Hi filmy, thanks for the quick reply. When you say uninstall and reinstall, are you referring to windows or just the 1394 driver? I suppose to reinstall the 1394 card is very fast, I will try it today.

I do have a built-in network port running, and will try disabling that to see if it makes a difference (it was OK in Win 2000, but maybe the interrupt sharing is allocated differently). I have already disabled the 1394 "network adaptor".

Richard

I found it *very* helpful to have a dual-boot system with a small, stripped (bare bones, but updated, WinXP) partition dedicated to just video capture.

I was able to capture all 8 or so hours of the last Super Bowl without a single dropped frame (Using Scenalyzer).

Just FYI.

Got it working now. In case anyone else is interested, moving the 1394 card to the next PCI slot solved it. I think it was sharing an interrupt with my graphics card which doesn't sound too clever. Now it's on it's own and working fine (at least until the next problem comes along!).

Richard

jaegersing:
I got the exact same problem here: Win2K to XP "upgrade" and I got to this result from a first attempt to capture:

number of clips:28
frames dropped: 2015 (!!!)
session lenght: 00:05:07:24
average frame rate: 23,19 fps
average data rate: 2,65 MB/sec

Freshly defragged drive, no app running (at least, from what I know; I closed all the windows and firewall and no anti-virus running).
While I was capturing, everything (sound and video) was jerky.
Everything was soooo OK with Win2K. I already miss it...

Just general info FWIW, think when you relocated the card XP automatically reinstalled it using the drivers that were already installed. Upgrades to XP can be problematic (tons of folks advise a clean install only), but can be the only way to go if your run older stuff that's not really compatible.

XP does a lot to ensure compatibility, so if you upgrade from an earlier version of windows, it will try to compensate for what it sees as older hardware and software. There are prog and hardware that you can't get running in XP any other way, but as you may have found out, it can also screw up stuff that would work in XP if they were installed clean.

If you like the idea of a stripped xp setup, which does have it's benefits, you can also try setting up different profiles. Can do this with your normal user logon, or set up a new logon with limited capabilities, as in no networking whatsoever I think. At any rate, might want to check out http://www.blackviper.com/index.html - has a lot of info re: services you can turn off, & there are not a lot of sources of info on this.

I tried the main tweaks suggested by BlackViper and tried to capture again: absolutely no change at all. Like one dropped frame every second...

??????????????????????????

I was going to answer that yes, I meant uninstall the 1394 card and re-install it. But you already figured that out. Glad it helped!

Hi Mikkie, thanks for your comments. Just to clarify, my Win XP Pro install WAS a clean install, to a separate partition from the Win 2K one. So all the drivers were new with XP.

I think what was different compared to the Win 2K installation was that I originally installed Win 2K with a bare bones PC, and then added the various PCI cards one at a time. With XP, all the cards were already in place and XP made the decisions on the order that everything got installed.

By the way, before I moved the 1394 card to the new slot, I uninstalled the driver just in case there was any conflict when it detected the "new" card. Not sure if that makes a difference or not, but that's what I did.

Richard