Vista - Bad dvr-ms files in Vista Media Center

For the last two months I've been having trouble with certain dvr-ms files
recorded in Media Center, both in my original 32-bit version of Vista Home
Premium, and a recent upgrade to 64-bit. About 40% of the files I record
seem to be corrupted. They play for 15-20 seconds and then nearly stop,
bumping ahead just a few frames at a time every four or five seconds. There
doesn't appear to be any obvious pattern -- it can happen to any program at
any time, on any channel. But when I convert the bad dvr-ms files to mpgs
they play perfectly from beginning to end. I haven't found this problem
described anywhere else on the Web so I'm hoping to get an answer here. I
record on an HP dv9640us laptop. Thanks in advance for any and all help.

I think I may have found the source of the problem myself -- it turns out
that the 2TB external drive hard drive I have used to store recorded videos
for the last five months was highly (make that HUGELY) defragmented. I had
assumed that Vista defragmenter was automatically defragging that drive, and
it was set to do so. But without any kind of drive map or disk analyzer in
Vista defragger it's nearly impossible to check the drive for fragmentation
or tell how thoroughly defragged it was, or indeed if it was defragged at
all. Now I'm using the freeware Auslogics defrag to fix the drive -- it
looks like it's going to take about a week to finish. I would argue that
Vista's "Defrag Lite" is totally inadequate for today's terabyte-sized hard
drives. The extrernal drive was also in a RAID 0 configuration -- wolud that
also limit the Vista defragger's effectiveness?

"Waxtadpole" wrote: