Can you solve my choppy video problem?

[imrealdumb]

Ok, I have an old PC - a Dell Dimension PIII 500mhz with 384 in RAM. I run XP Pro on it. Yes, it's old, but until recently, everything worked fine.

About a year ago, I noticed that video was choppy. At first it was just video watching via DIVX or WMV. Then over the past 6 months, flash video became choppy, too. This included watching clips on youtube.

I had to rebuild the HD and assumed that this would mean that my video problems were solved - they weren't. Watching AVI on my PC is choppy unless I use VLC Media Player, which isn't perfect, but good enough. But nothing on youtube runs cleanly for me.

I know my PC is old, but why would the video in Flash look so choppy? I have the latest Adobe Flash player. I've downloaded the K-Lite Codecs. I've tried different refresh and performance settings. I think I have the latest drivers for my video card, which is an old NVIDIA, but shouldn't be a problem watching simple youtube videos.

What am I missing? Any help would greatly be appreciated. Thanks.

[aedipuss]

a piii 500 barely has the horsepower to play mpeg-2/dvds. anything else that requires cpu decoding is going to be bad. the codec pack probably hurt more than it helped.

10 year old versions of programs/video players probably ran ok, but newer ones need a faster cpu and much more than 384MB of ram to operate. most current programs are likely to need to use the swap file on your system to run and that will cause slowdowns.

[guns1inger]

Defrag. Turn off an background tasks you don't need. Use a low overhead player like VLC.

Note that Youtube have increased the quality of their clips, even basic quality has improved, so a faster machine is needed to play them smoothly.

Face it, your machine is a dinosaur and will simply get further behind as everyone else moves forward.