So, on with my tale. Laurie and I decided we wanted to watch movies while working at our dining room table. (We sit across the table from each other with our laptops on stands, back-to-back. THis makes for a nice setup for working near each other but not bothering each other much.) We put an LCD panel to my left and Laurie's right. I decided I would see if my Inspiron XPS-Gen2 could play DVDs while I got some work done. I was mostly just using the web or PuTTY or the like.

This setup was working great. PowerDVD, QuickTime, and Windows Media player all played their video in their window and full screen on the second monitor, by default. That actually surprised me, but it worked great!

After a while, I began to do some much more processor intensive things. And that's when the troubles started. The movies started skipping real bad and my machine would become almost unusable. I was doing some graphics stuff in Google's Picasa 2 with some Canon RAW files at 8MP. This took both a lot of memory and a lot of processor. The DVD playing had been using between 15% and 30% of the processor. This made watching the movie impossible and the seeking on the DVD, for some reason, tied up the mouse and doing anything in Picasa. Everything was suffering.

Then I made the following change. I went in to the Processes view of the task manager and changed PowerDVD.exe to have the next higher priority and changed Picasa and some other intensive applications I was using to the next lower priority. And guess what happened?

Everything began working absolutely perfectly together! The movies never skipped again and I was still getting plenty of performance in Picasa 2 to do what I want -- it didn't even feel much slower than normal. After all, the movie was normally only using about 20% of the processor. It's just that when they both had the same scheduler priority Picasa 2 would completely take over because it was the foreground application. Changing it to be lower and the other to be higher meant that no matter how much "in the background" the movie was it would get scheduled in.

I was actually surprised how well Picasa 2 was still performing given it had lower priority than anything else. I guess being the foreground application it still got the attention it needed but could never preempt the movie player when it needed to get something done.

Anyway, that's my tale of a situation in which Windows XP actually kicked ass and worked wonderfully well for the situation I was presented with.