Browser juddering in video playing and downloading

[beanzontoast]

My daughter's Xp computer is having a problem and I'd be grateful of any suggestions.

Symptoms: since about 2 days ago, when she's watching You Tube or other video over the internet, it is very 'jerky', freezing then restarting several times a minute. This is even when the progress bar shows that the entire video has been downloaded, so it's not being caused by the connection not being able to keep up. Before 2 days ago, everything played fine. Also, when I went to the Speedtest website on her computer to look at the connection quality, the download test was also jerky - instead of the download monitor's pointer hovering around one point, it stuck at one point, jerked to another, then to another and so on. When I loaded Process Explorer, one feature I noticed was that Internet Explorer seems to be using 80-90% of the cpu quite often, which to me seems very high.

Her computer is hardwired to the modem, as is mine. My computer exhibits none of these problems. We have a 10+ meg connection, so there's no problem there that should be causing the juddering video and general download speed.

Things I've tried:
- Full virus and malware scans
- replacing her network cable
- using different port on the router
- turning off indexing
- uninstalling and reinstalling Shockwave and Flash Player

The problem persists. The only thing I can think of is that Internet Explorer (which she prefers) is somehow to blame (maybe damaged?) - but can I reinstall that on top of the existing install? Maybe I should try a different browser and see if the problem is replicated there?

Any suggestions would be welcomed please!

 

[marinyork]

Without knowing the specs of the computer if resources are a bit tight perhaps the cache needs clearing? Or clear a bit off the hd? You can certainly get that kind of behaviour off slower systems when that happens.

 

[nigelb]

Is her laptop up to date with patches from Microsoft?

Anyway, try a different browser, will show whether its just IE that has the problem.

Also worth making sure its not low on disk space (like out of space)?

Nige

 

[Norm]

+1 to both of the above.

If it is doing it when the file has fully downloaded, you can, IMO, ignore all the avenues you have been pursuing as it will not be about the network or connections.

What spec is the system? Try a different browser.

 

[gaz]

have you tried turning if off and then back on. that fixes 99.9%* of issues with your computer

*this is not a confirmed figure

 

[rusky]

Spookily, I have just been researching this as I have a similar issue.

On my PC, it only happpens in Firefox, IE is fine. I suspect it's an addon but read that it may be the session restore function within FF.

How often does the video stop?

 

[beanzontoast]

Thanks all for the suggestions. Here's a few answers to point raised -

Its an Xp system with 2gb memory. All updates done - it's always been kept up to date..

The classic turn-off-and-on remedy made no difference - as I said, has been going on for a couple of days now and it started suddenly.

Have tried clearing cache but no improvement.

HD space is fine - not a huge hard drive, but she has 30+ gig spare.

Video is juddering every few seconds irregularly. Moving the mouse while video is playing or running any other process seems to make it worse. CPU load is very, very high. It's not only video playback that's affected: general browsing (i.e. loading pages from internet) is juddery - the download seems to happen in a stop-start manner.

Have tried another browser - problem still there, so that rules out Internet explorer as the cause.

Googling the problem returns loads of people with similar issues. I think I'm going to delve a little deeper into processes that are running and try shutting them off one at a time until the culprit is found. It's all I can think of at this stage.

 

[rusky]

What browser are you running? I'm running Firefox & it freezes but IE doesn't.

What are the processes using the most CPU resources?

If I watch this clip,
View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyeJU6U00wA
it reliably freezez at 25 secs

 

[beanzontoast]

Problem seems to have been resolved by doing a System Restore to a point about a week ago. Fingers crossed anyway!

 

[Hacienda71]

Might be worth clearing your cache as previously mentioned and also defragging your harddrive. This will take a while so not a bad idea to leave the computer doing this for a couple of hours. Also check that you do not have too many applications automaticaly opening in your task bar and check your CPU useage by ctrl+alt+del. I would defrag now even if the problem seems resolved, it will do no harm.

 

[beanzontoast]

Might be worth clearing your cache as previously mentioned and also defragging your harddrive. This will take a while so not a bad idea to leave the computer doing this for a couple of hours. Also check that you do not have too many applications automaticaly opening in your task bar and check your CPU useage by ctrl+alt+del. I would defrag now even if the problem seems resolved, it will do no harm.

Yup - tried the cache thing previously, disk had been defragged only a week before it started happening. As I mentioned, I'd used Process Explorer to look at what was going on, but main thing is, it's gone away. I was considering a quick reinstall of Windows if it continued as there comes a point when that's worth giving a go rather than spending too long looking for the needle in the computer haystack!

 

[2Loose]

I had something like this - working in one browser but the other behaved oddly - and it turned out to be a duff Adobe Flash to blame.
Easily tested by comparing Firefox and IE performance and a reinstall of Firefox solved it at the time.