Laggy playback after installing XP

[lazyturbo]

I have a P3 650Mhz, 128 Ram that used to run on Windows 98. It played videos fine, in all formats and in fullscreen.

After I installed XP, it can only play videos well in 1x zoom. In 2x or fullscreen, the video gets really laggy. I've tried different players, including WMP, Real, and VLC but they all give similar results. I realize that XP probably takes up more graphics memory, and that I have an old computer....but is there anything I can do to watch my videos in fullscreen again?

Thanks.

[redwudz]

128MB RAM is very minimal for XP, and that is without graphics. CPU speed is not so much an issue. If you can upgrade to 256MB RAM or more, that should help.

I'm also assuming you are not using a onboard graphics card that uses system RAM as a supplement to video RAM. Are you using the latest motherboard drivers? That can have a big influence on speed. If your MB is too old or no updated motherboard or graphics drivers are available, then more RAM may be your only option. Also, can you upgrade your graphics card, or is that set by the motherboard? A newer card may take some load off the CPU and RAM.

The other things you can do is make sure nothing else is running on the computer that may steal CPU cycles or drag down the graphics speed.

XP can be a resource hog, but you should be able to control it.

[lazyturbo]

Hmm, thanks. But I don't think I'm going to put anymore money into this computer, because I already have a new one, and I just use this one occasionally.

I've managed to temporarily solve the problem by changing the screen resolution to 800x600 when I want to watch videos in fullscreen, and changing it back to 1024x768 when I'm using the computer regularly.

[jagabo]

Enable overlay.

[lazyturbo]

How do I enable overlay?

[jagabo]

How do I enable overlay?

The exact procedure varies depending on what card you have and what drivers. But it's somewhere in the Advanced Display Settings:

Control Panel -> Display -> Settings -> Advanced...

[lazyturbo]

I don't have anything in there that says anything about Overlay.

[jagabo]

Are you using the default video drivers that Windows installed? Or did you download drivers from the manufacturer? The minimal Windows drivers usually don't support advanced features like overlay.

[TBoneit]

The biggest problem is that you installed XP on a machine wil less than an optimal amount of memory. Windows 98 will run really fine with 128Mb of memory.

XP will really need more than 256 Mb to run as smoothly. IOW 384 or 512Mb. Add a 256 and you would probably not need to rezise your screen down.