Media Portal running very sluggishly

[postitnote100@yahoo.com]

I have just installed Media Portal, but it is running slowly. I am hoping it is not my hardware but is something that can be tweaked. My processor is a pentium M 1.4 GH (I know it is a little on the slow side, but meets the minimum requirements). The video card is Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME graphics controller with 64 MB of memory and supports directX.

I currently don't have a tuner card - I wanted to install MediaPortal and see how it runs before committing money to buying the card.

Anyway, MediaPortal takes several seconds to transition from menu to menu and when viewing photos or videos, it takes over a minute to do anything.

My hope is based on the fact that outside of Media Portal, my system runs fine and I can view photos and video with no hitches.

Any ideas? I am completely ignorant of DirectX and what should be done to take full advantage of it, so it is very probable the problem lies somewhere there.

[James]

Originally Posted by postitnote100@yahoo.com

Any ideas? I am completely ignorant of DirectX and what should be done to take full advantage of it, so it is very probable the problem lies somewhere there.

You hit the problem on the head there. This graphic card is not going to work.

You really need a graphic card that can do DirectX9.

[Waltz]

That's right, a DirectX 9 capable graphics card will do the trick.
That would be at least a GeForce FX 5200 or a Radeon 9500 based card.
Looks like you are using a notebook, though - you won't be able to make an upgrade to its graphics chip, I'm afraid.

- Waltz

[postitnote100@yahoo.com]

Originally Posted by Waltz

Looks like you are using a notebook, though - you won't be able to make an upgrade to its graphics chip, I'm afraid.

- Waltz

Thanks, very helpful both of you.

You're right, I'm using an older notebook with a broken screen - instead of fixing the screen, I thought I might hook it up to my tv and turn it into a media pc.

I ran DirectX Diagnostic tool and it says that Direct3D 7, 8, and 9 work successfully. Is Direct3D 9 the same as DirectX 9?

As for upgrading the video card - I do have an available pc slot. Would it not be possible to upgrade that way? Again, sorry if I'm displaying a lot of ignorance here.

[Waltz]

Direct3D is a part of DirectX.

The graphics chip works with DirectX 9 installed and can run DX9 software, but it doesn't support all the DirectX 9 features. Since MediaPortal uses some of them, it runs much faster when the chip offers hardware acceleration for these functions.
With PC slot, do you mean a PC Card slot, also known as PCMCIA? I'm sorry, you cannot put another graphics card in there.

Using an old notebook with broken display as a media center PC is an interesting idea. But I'm afraid you will not be able to run MediaPortal flawlessly on this system.

- Waltz

[postitnote100@yahoo.com]

Thanks for all your help. Too bad. I like media portal, but I'll have to wait to use it sometime in the future.

In the meantime, I'll have to figure something else out with my laptop.

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