Just came back on a flight and for the second time I was disappointed with choppy dvd playback on movies.  Funny thing is that some movies play perfectly and are smooth from beginning to end and others are choppy and studder throughout.  Any way to correct this or improve the playback performance?

I have a TR3AP1 maxed out with RAM and pretty much doing nothing in the backround during playback.

You may want to check the performance settings. Assuming you haven’t installed Windows XP from scratch, you can use the Power Panel software to adjust for DVD playback and it should play extremely smoothly. I’ve never had any DVD playback issues with my TR unless I forced the TR to run at 600Mhz only (Ultimate Battery setting). If it’s on adaptive or performance modes then it’s perfectly fine.

I am on performance and I use a pretty conservative setting with 7 as the brightness.  The only thing I can think of is that on my “custom” setting I have the fan speed set to 1 and not to 5 which is the performance setting.  Perhaps it is getting too hot?  I just put it back to 5 but, I doubt that is what was causing the shudder.  Furthermore, at 5 for fan speed I am using even more battery power which kind of defeats the purpose when trying to conserve power while viewing a dvd.

Maybe I have something running in the backround that is sucking some CPU power?  Any suggestions?

One more question..any advantage or disadvantage upgrading to powerdvd 5.0 from the version installed from Sony?  Will I still be able to use the Sony software with the upgraded version?

I haven’t done it yet but, considering doing it soon.

the full version will more likely render more features than the one that came with sony..

Thanks linc, one more question…

Should I uninstall the Sony player before installing the new player?

i would..but that’s just me.