Server 03 is a bit new to be running on that Athlon system. Especially with only 768mb of RAM, it would be very demanding on an old K7. Might want to look at a K8/P4 system with 2gb RAM if you insist on using Server 03. Win2k would be more suitable for a rig like that Athlon.

I'd use W2K also. MPC-classic would play DVD's fine with an ATI AIW AGP 2X (7500?) when I had a GX dual gig (P6DGS maybe?) with a scsi Pioneer slot DVD. The memory doesn't matter if enough and you can always manually divide up affinity and one cpu shouldn't even max out with an ATI of the era. As I remember that rig was butter smooth and would rip at 4x or so and compress at 15 fps maybe, while other stuff was undisturbed. It was to loud however...

When using the right software (perhaps that was Win9x) a PIII 500 should be able to play DVDs without much help from the video card. Of course it depends very much on the player software, if it does a lot of post processing on the CPU it's probably to much for that system. You should be able to turn post processing off, though.

Since you write that burning DVDs takes up most of the CPU power: Does the system have trouble with the bus mastering? What happens if you rip a DVD to the hard disk and play it from there?

Regarding SMP: I don't think this will help. There is certainly software for video converting/transcoding that is able to use multiple CPU cores, but I don't think you will find this for just playing DVDs. SMP was uncommon for consumer usage at that era, and playing videos is about as much "consumer" as I can imagine.

All I wanted this PC to do is run Windows Server 2003, play DVD's good, not skip when playing music files, and store my files

This is by no means something you need retro hardware for. You could probably buy a more up-to-date machine fully capable of playing DVDs and so on for the same price that you'd pay for a fancy SMP setup, and it would work a whole lot better.

If you're determined to use this computer for playing DVDs, try Geexbox – it runs from a very compact Linux distro off a bootable CD. You might need one of the older 1.x versions.

Keep in mind that a media player needs to support the decoder features of your video card if they're going to do any good. Aside from Geexbox, I think PowerDVD has good support.

computergeek92 wrote:

but even burning DVD discs takes up most of the cpu power.

It has never been a good idea to try to do anything else while burning a disc.