Tips for improving DVD performance

Hello,
I’m looking for tips on improving the performance of my DVD drive. I have a creative dvd blaster 12x running on a duron 900,192mb ram, 32mb nvidia tnt2 graphics card and Win Me system. I would expect to see seemless performance from this spec as I have on pc’s with a lower spec but this is not the case. I have been told to use dma mode on this drive but this absolutly kills it as it does with any type of cd in this mode so I use pio mode instead. I’v noticed that the hard disc drive light is constantly on when playing a dvd so I believe if this could be stopped performance could be improved. Any tips to help would be welcome. Thanks.
I use Windvd but its the same for any player.