Please Help! DVD playback driving me mad!

Sesheta

Can anyone help me? Got delivery of a brand shiny new Dell Inspiron 1300 on Friday and within hours there was an annoying popup about Sonic Download Manager not having sufficient bits and demanding a cd (already mentioned on another thread!)

More worryingly dvd playback has gone to pot having gone from crystal clear to horrible blocky artifacts in any dark parts of the screen. This only happens when playing dvds, I've played .avi files and jpegs with no image problems. It's also not a blanket problem. Sometimes it works fine...then it doesn't. It's been four days and I'm going mad!

Now ok the machine doesn't have the greatest graphics capabilities - although it handles stills on Photoshop with ease - it's just the dvds. I tried installing PowerDVD instead of the annoying Dell Media Centre thingy that you get as standard but have the same problem.

I'd rather not have to deal with Dell Technical support because on a computer this new it can't be anything major...can it?

Please help!

daywalker

Unfortunatly even brand spanking new computers can have problems, i would say that you are going to have to bite the bullet and contact Dell, as you have ruled out the software problem by using alternative software, so the problem is most likely hardware related