Not to get off the failing-drive track, but have you installed any new drivers or run any Windows Updates recently? Maybe a driver is acting up and making the system freak out. What about changes to system properties (Speedstep, power saver, new hardware, etc.)? Battery vs. AC? 'Just fishing for other possibilities.

I've encountered the bad memory stick problem on another laptop. 'Turned out the slot itself was a little flaky. Check to see how much memory the computer reports each time you start it up. If it only shows 256MB (which would indicate only one working stick on your setup), you may have a memory problem. Try running MemTest for several hours to see if it turns up anything.

http://www.memtest.org/

Christopher, thanks for the link to the SMART utility. I plan to check that out for my desktop PC.

James, Go back to Event Viewer. Open System (I assume the errors are there) and then click Action, Save Log File As.... Save the file (giving it a name) and put it on a web or ftp page. PRIVATE MAIL me where it is, and I will look at it. Just in case, I am at gsellis at charter dot net. If it is smaller than 1MB, you can attach it.

You're welcome!

1 gig of RAM installed
 

Last week, I installed two new OEM 512 MB sticks of RAM and none of the symptoms have changed. So, I'm thinking that it's my hard drive or my processor but am leaning more towards the drive. I also just learned that there are 7200K rpm drives under $200 available for my laptop! My only concern about that is a possibly larger power requirement for a faster drive. Is this the case?

I got a new PCMCIA card last week and it came with a basic version of ULEAD VideoStudio 8 SE software. I just loaded it to see if would capture without losing frames and it was the same issue. It plays fine, smooth and normal, in the preview window but when I hit capture it starts stuttering and skipping. This is driving me crazy!!

Error Log Reports
 

Here are some of the errors that I found in my event reports after doing what George said. I felt like I was looking at a bowl of Lucky Charms: white captions, red x's, yellow triangles.......

Event Reports

Application Log

The vast majority of the listings are captions with a blue - i - inside of
them. Most of the other errors with red Xs are - application hang - and
some occur in clusters. Others that are much few red Xs are -application
errors-. Then there are quite a few, not as many as red Xs though, with
yellow triangles (with exclamations) that say -event system-

Red Xs are - application hang -

Yellow triangles (with exclamations) that say - event system -

____________________________

Quite a few of each, x's and triangles, but mostly - i - captions

System Log
Plenty of captions with a blue - i - inside of them

Red X - DCOM -
Red X - Service Control Manager -
Red X - W32Time -
Red X - ntfs -
Red X - atapi -
Red X - Server -
Red X - acpiec -
Red X - pcmcia -
____________________________

Yellow triangle - MrxSmb -
Yellow triangle - Server -
Yellow triangle - E100b -
Yellow triangle - Dhcp -
Yellow triangle - W32Time -
Yellow triangle - acpiec -
Yellow triangle - ftdisk -
Yellow triangle - disk -

Note: I'm quite sure that the - disk - warnings are from when I was having USB flash drive issues that occurred at the dates of the logged events. The disk warnings also coincide with the pcmcia errors with both of these issues being associated with an imcompatible PCMCIA card.

Related Thread
www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=51341

From the "for what it's worth" files, I would take a look at your display driver and play with the screen res settings. Issues with display drivers account for most system hangs, dropped frames and multimedia software issues from my past experience.

For instance, my Dell Optiplex G150 must be set to "256 colors" in order for me to capture DV. Then, after, the capture I just set it back.

Barring this, I'd just reformat with a new drive and reinstall the OS. Been there, down that. Takes time but well worth the effort.

George

Well, after this one and the issue below, I have been successfully capturing video to an external drive. I still cannot capture to the internal drive without dropping frames.

Relative Thread
www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=53027