This summer I took my Dell Latitude D830 with me on holiday to view the movies that I recorded with a Panasonic HD video camera.
Frustratingly enough, in France it turned out to be impossible to play them on my laptop 🙁 Spent hours fiddling with every imaginable setting. At home everything worked fine though.
Yesterday I had packed my stuff to go watch a movie at a friend’s house, and when checking the downloaded MKV again I noticed that VLC had huge problems playing it, both 720p and 1080i H264 files.
Everything started working when I accidentally swapped power supplies. Turns out the D830 (maybe other models too) severely slows down when you use the small 65 Watt power supply.
Tip: ONLY use the 90 Watt model, unless you want to experience Pentium 4 speeds…