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Sun 19 Jan, 2003 06:36 pm
I have a Pentium II 450mhz computer. At the time, it was top of the line, so the components are pretty good.
Anyhow, as some of you know, my monitor died, and bought a Samsung Syncmaster 191T LCD Monitor. When I surf the net, the picture looks terriffic.
This afternoon, I watched a DVD on the computer. It looked very good, but not great. Would a faster graphics card improve the performance, or is my computer just too slow to show moving pictures optimally?
My husband asked me if he could hook our DVD into the computer. Is it possible? If so, how would you do it, and would it make any difference in the quality of the picture?
I'd take a stab at upgrading the video card. You'll probably see a marked improvement for relatively little cost or effort. Don't "overgun" your machine; the really exotic pricey cutting edge video cards probably won't do you much good.
Let me know if your machine supports AGP, or requires a PCI video card (yes, there are two incompatible types ... sorry)
and I can point you toward some choices.
DVD Player to PC is possible, but requires specific supporting hardware. As far as I'm concerned, it would be a "Why bother?".
timber
timber- The video card that I have now is a 16mb nvidia 3D AGP. What would you suggest for an upgrade that would help, but would not cost a fortune?
I am very happy about what you said about connecting a regular DVD to the computer. My husband wanted to do that. He knows a lot about hi-fi, but practically nothing about computers. I did not want to futz around with that!
Cool ... AGP is good. I'll pull up some reviews for you if you want. Any current AGP card under $100 will probably be fine. Plenty should be adequate somewhere in the $50 range ... nVidia, ATI, and Creative all have pretty nice cards. I found a really nice Oxygen for a bit less than $3200 ...
Anyhow, 64 to 128MB Video memory should do you fine. I'll get back to this sometime today.
timber
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