Videos lag sometimes

My laptop is a couple of years old, so I know it's pretty obsolete with the way technology is nowadays.

Anyway, sometimes on videos like on YouTube and such, the video lags, having to load or buffer or whatever first, only for a second or so later lagging yet again.

I assume that a lot of things sometimes come into play on stuff like this...RAM, processor speed, graphics card, drivers for devices, etc.

Is there anything I can do without buying additional hardware? I mean, what drivers or whatever can I update that might possibly fix this and how do I go about doing it? Will it even help?

If your laptop is a couple of years old, chances are, you can't get many parts especially for a laptop. One of the things you can upgrade is your RAM, which I think is in the DDR series. I'm not sure if they are available these days, but if you happen to get one, I doubt it will be cheap. I don't think updating your drivers will help though.

When was the last time you had a clean install of Windows? Nothing feels better than the clean install of windows. You call.

@Doctor Inferno wrote:If your laptop is a couple of years old, chances are, you can't get many parts especially for a laptop. One of the things you can upgrade is your RAM, which I think is in the DDR series. I'm not sure if they are available these days, but if you happen to get one, I doubt it will be cheap. I don't think updating your drivers will help though.

When was the last time you had a clean install of Windows? Nothing feels better than the clean install of windows. You call.

Yeah, my laptop takes DDR2 RAM. I saw 2GB (2 - 1GB) on buy.com on their weekly special for around $24 that I might get.

But, would that help with the videos lagging?

I've thought about reinstalling windows, but I've never done that and not quite sure how and I'd have to backup a few things on here, which I need to do anyway

I don't think it will. But it also depends on the browser you are using. Try Firefox, after install it, let me know, I will give you some speed tweaks.

If you are using an OEM version of XP, you are just a click away from a clean install. In the start menu there should be a menu for system recovery.

I'm using Firefox browser.

I'm using the Windows XP Media Center Edition that came on my laptop.

In the Firefox address bar type in about:config in the Filter bar type in pipe right click in network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and click Modify, change the value to 100. This will allow firefox to receive 100 connections at once.

Make sure that network.http.pipelining is set to true, if it is not, right click and toogle it. It might help a bit, but videos will just have to load. What I do when I had a slow connection is to pause the video first and let it load finish. If you have a faster internet connection, you will not experience this.