Thinkpads Forum

Hello,
I have a 770 running windows 98 SE. Currently 192megs of RAM (upgrading soon) and original 4 GIGS of HD (with 30gig external USB HD). I bought the Computer used and am not sure about the CPU Speed. It just says Pentium(r)(windows system info). Is that (233Mhz?) I just purchased an IBM DVD/CD-ROM and the Enhanced Video adapter. I need to know what I need to get this baby running. The machine picked its own driver for the DVD ROM and it runs cd's(not DVD's) fine. The IBM site said it must have a player (DVDexpress or Soft DVD) and drivers and installation in a certain order. I looked on this site for help but there is just too much info to find my problem on here. I did see Power DVD as a possible player but not sure if it was for this CPU speed. I'm not very familiar with this stuff at all. Please tell me exactly what player, and drivers I need and where to get them so I can see if my hardware works. I'm thinking this should be a quick download from somewhere and not a lot of trouble. Thank you for your help.

i strongly recommend try this FREE software to watch DVD

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video ... lassic.cfm

I agree with wireless4laptop that Media Player Classic is an outstanding, free, media player. However, I don't think that it makes use of the hardware acceleration on the DVD and Enhanced Video Adapter you just purchased. My understanding is that under Windows 98/98SE, the only DVD players that contain the program hooks necessary to make use of your new MPEG decoder is Mediamatics DVDExpress or SoftDVD.

If you were using Windows 2000, you could use the built-in Microsoft Media Player, and Windows 2000 actually comes with all the drivers you need. You will be able to use Media Player Classic for all kinds of media files under Windows 98SE (I do), but I don't think that it will use the card's hardware, and so you will probably find that DVDs do not play smoothly on a 266MHz machine.

I don't know how to get a copy of SoftDVD.

An ISO of the original DVDExpress is available from a special files area on thinkpads.com: FTP Resource.

Some users (including me!) have had difficulty configuring/installing DVDExpress correctly so that it will make use of the hardware MPEG decoder under Windows 98SE. I don't have good advice on how to do that, but you will for sure also need to download and use the following files:
DVDExpress - MPEG features IV package for Windows 95/98 - ThinkPad 770
and possibly also:
Mediamatics DVDExpress video player update - ThinkPad 770.

Good luck,

Phil.