I’ve got a 9 year old PC running Windows XP – (apparently a AMD 64 Processor Athlon+ 3200 2.2Ghz!) 2Gb ram, 2x500Gb hdd and 512Mb graphics card. At the time it was reasonably cutting edge…now it is well past it’s use by date. I no longer have the installation discs for the software on it as I lost them when I threw the wrong box out in a house move!

Buying a new PC could be an option but not the first option as a) I can’t afford a new machine and b) I need to use some of the software on this machine.

New graphics card isn’t an option as they all seem to be PCI Express and I don’t have that slot on my motherboard and PCI cards appear to be incredibly expensive these days (no wonder seeing as it’s old news !).

So, what can I look at/do to try and get playback of videos (youtube/Vimeo/local drive files – both filmed in HD and SD) back to how it was?

Cheers.

Malware scan.

Latest version of flash.

Uninstall anything you never use (check the system tray where the clock is, is it full of icons?)

After that clear out all of the dust on your graphics card heatsink, that usually causes similar problems after a long time.

It gets a ‘regular’ vacuuming…about every 6 months…not a huge amount of dust in there but it has been noted.

Will run another malware scan tonight, I thought my security package did all that but no harm in running another.

Cheers.

What are you using for the video playback? tried VLC?

Best advise, install a version of Linux, it will be like a new machine.

Windows 7 + turn on HTML5 for Youtube and Vimeo. It might be a bit far gone for decent HD playback though

Not really needing decent hd playback, just don’t want juttery playback.

Windows 7 can install but will loose all my software…at least I think it was Windows 7 I did the check for…

Media Player and Quicktime (and whatever Whytunes uses to play video – Quicktime?). Latest version of Firefox and the latest Flash plugin (that I can tell).

CTRL + SHIFT + ESC – take a screengrab of the performance and processes tab, and post them up here.

Get rid of all the stuff that runs on startup that you don’t need – CCleaner is very good for this. Go to Tools->Startup and disable anything that is just taking up resources without being useful ( for example “quick” start programs for Office apps, PDF readers, etc ).

Defrag your hard disk. I use O&O, but I am sure that there’s a good free alternative out there.

I strip mine back to scratch every now and again and it solves the issues. Running a power hungry Firefox didn’t help when watching you tube etc so switched that too

Reinstalling Windows will almost certainly improve performance. If you’ve got the license key sticker on the side of the PC, but not the disks, you can usually pick up a generic OEM version of XP on Ebay for cheap.

If you really don’t want to reinstall Windows, try updating the graphics drivers (from the AMD or Nivida site, depending on the card). Also download a demo of Tuneup Utilities (http://www.tune-up.com/) and work through the optimisations that offers. Sometimes a registry defrag or clean can work wonders. Make sure you backup first though, just in case.

As others have suggested, something like Ubuntu or Lubuntu (even the live boot CD, which won’t touch your disk) will likely perform much, much faster.

Finally, on my very slow PC, I have found Media Player Classic Home Cinema is even better than VLC at playing SD and especially HD videos smoothly. It’s free to download, and worth a go.

Also, are you sure your graphics card isn’t in an AGP slot? It’s pretty rare for a PC of that era to use a PCI card. If it’s AGP, you can pick up a better card on Ebay for next to nothing.