dvd shrink slowing up

[sayersc]

Dvd shrink used to take about half an hour to put a film onto my hard drive, but now it take about 70 mins.This happened all of a sudden,i have reinstalled it,also dvd decrypter also takes considerably longer.Any ideas why this is happening?

[nwg]

Have you defragged your hard disk recently. When you are dealing with 4GB+ worth of files, the HDD can get fragmented more quickly than normal.

Also check for viruses as well.

[sayersc]

I had a e mail virus but got rid of it and it made no difference.I installed clone dvd2 and alcohol 120% and around that it slowed down,but i have since taken them off.
I havent defragmented in a while so i'll try that,thanks.

[nwg]

You may want to check for a file called system32.exe in the windows system folder. This is not a system file but a virus. My AV software had deactivated it but the file still loaded itself on startup. This file can make the cpu work harder.

[voo_doo99]

You may also want to check that your hard drive is running in DMA mode and not PIO mode.

[writersblock29]

@sayersc

It really is hard to say what could be slowing you down. Viruses, Spyware, Addware, ect. tend to be easilly picked up while browsing the Internet -- and many run quietly in the background, unknown by you yet still eating up system resources. You might want to install Spybot (free program which you'll easilly find with a Google search) and run it. There's also Spywareblaster, which will enable you to prevent picking certain things up to begin with and runs in perfect harmony with Spybot. Even if you have a spyware remover already on your machine, you'll be amazed at how many things you may have missed with it.

I have yet for my own copy of DVD Shrink to be bothered by driver conflicts with other programs... but in all fairness, sometimes certain programs just plain clash with others.

If you're using Windows XP, you can use task manager to check what programs are active at any given time... but many of these will be things you may not recognize on sight.

Your best bet is to troubleshoot it. Try to figure out what new programs you've installed or changed before noticing the DVD Shrink slowdown. Check DVD Shrink's settings as well: Did you accidentally switch on the "low priority" setting, where perhaps in the past you'd have it unchecked? Are you typically still using your computer while encoding? Enabling the video preview function (this will slow you down a bit if it's on)? Have you flashed the firmware of your reading drive recently (hacked firmware's a risky venture and -- if not the correct version for your drive, can mess things up something fierce)?

And the idea of defragging your hard drive is a pretty darned good one! Especially if you have a lot of stuff on the hard drive to begin with -- MP3s and video files quickly take up a lot of room, and the system will slow down in direct proportion to how full your hard drive is (trust me on this: I edit a lot of video footage on mine and have seen it happen!).

Sorry to sound so vague... but system slowdown can be a sign of pretty much anything! Kind of like taking your car to a mechanic and simply telling him: "It don't run right!" Hopefully this gives you some ideas, though!