Another Glitch in "Old Betsy", My Geriatric Computer

Perhaps the DVD disk was not properly seated in the player.

Acquiunk- Last night I had tried to put 3-4 different DVDs in the player. The same thing happened each time.

Tried again this morning, and the damn thing worked perfectly. The only thing that I can think of is that something went awry, and rebooting it this morning fixed the problem.

There's a good chance you're right, Phoenix. If you have further problems with it though, give us a holler.

Another glitch
There may be a loose connection somewhere inside the computer - next time it happens (if) you could try shaking the unit - gently - and see if something jiggles into place.

But let's hope you don't have to resort to that.

Tomkitten
- First thing my husband, the electronics guru (but knows diddlysquat about 'puters) did was check out the connections.

i see a controdicionin that statement lol, if you are a electronics guru you understand computers atleast on a basic hardware lvl

Maybe anti-theft protections have been added to new DVD's since you got your software. Your software may be having trouble reading the movie through the new anti-theft features.

Safecracker- See, it's like this. My husband can take apart an amplifier, replace parts with different components, and make it sound much better than the original. He has designed and made his own preamplifier. He is now fixing the power supply on his turntable. With all that, anything beyond turning the computer on and off,and surfing the net, he asks me!

I reckon this is a software problem, possibly a memory allocation problem.

It was fine after you rebooted because the OS has re-allocated all the memory so the DVD application has the amount of memory it requires. If it doesn't because you've run it after playing a game etc... (windows is notoriously bad at on-the-fly allocation) then it won't have the space to process the video signal from the disk as the required speed so the picture breaks up.
Data, pictures etc..., will be fine as they don't require continuous on-the-fly processing.

It's possible it's a graphics card problem but it depends on the card you have and whether it has hardware DVD decompression or not.
If it does and the problem is consistent (which it isn't) then it's probably the card. If the card doesn't have hardware decompression then it's the memory allocation problem I mentioned.

A reboot should sort it out every time.
If it doesn't then you may have a dodgy RAM strip or a poor/intermittent connection on the RAM to the motherboard.