DVDs play poorly

[Big_H]

I am helping a friend up grade his laptop and we're having a problem with his DVD play back.
He has an HP laptop, ~650mhz, 128-256mb RAM... running XP Pro (formally ME, the reason we're upgrading ). I've turned off all (or most) of the visual extras of XP, and the system is running great. Much faster than before.

The only problem is his DVD playback. When we ran a DVD it would skip and jump with PowerDVD, WinDVD, and IntraDVD (or whatever program comes on DVDs). It plays OK with VLC, but with all the programs it looks like crap. It looks like a bad rip, very pixalated and such.

This didn't happen before we upgraded, he said it ran smooth and looked great. He was using a program that came with his computer, DVDExpress, I can't find it on his recovery disks, and I can't find it on the web. From what I've been able to find out, it's been discontinued. I did find an update on the HP web site, but I need the full version before I can use that.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve DVD playback? Do codecs effect DVD movies? I have DivX and XviD installed, should I install any others?

Any help would be great! Thanks!

 

[psychosonik]

With out hp laptops, the software installs when you ghost the cd. HP uses ghost discs to completely wipe your hd. Once the windows is up and running you have to actually go to the start menu under dvd express and run the setup.exe from it... a little weird but that's how it goes. Aside from that make sure netmeeting isn't running, any overlay settings on the vid card need to be disabled. Good luck.