Any reason my computer's video playback would suddenly suck?

MetroidZoid

Never had an issue, even with WMP. Now, files in general on my computer take awhile to load, the main computer takes longer to boot up (I feel like they're related, as this all happened at the same time-ish), and especially streaming Youtube videos, where I never had an issue with full screen 1080 before, now it's laggy in full screen. Flash is up to date, none of the virus scanners (used three, recommended by the tech thread) picked up anything. Any route I can go to fix this? Oh and there's no graphics card, just whatever integrated card that came with the build my friend did. So yeah, it's not true 1080 coming out, but what I mean is that prior to this, Youtube would stream that setting fine.

TychoCelchuuu

Start > Type "cmd" in the search bar without quotes > Hit enter > type "chkdsk c: /r" without the quotes > wait a while and see if your HD is messed up.

bowen

overheating videocard/cpu ?

MetroidZoid

Tycho, I ran that and nothing came up unusual. Talking to a friend, it appears the problem is something running in the background, but I can't figure out what. I removed Spotify, as that seemed to be clogging up everything (but it was running fine for like a week ...), and have attributed the slow starting of the computer to the anti-virus programs. Which is fine, I just wanted to know why. And traveling between files to files is faster now that I've defragmented my hard drive. Which just leaves the video. Friend's gonna look to see what's running that I don't notice, but is there anything else I can use to boost my pc's performance? Also I don't think the video card is overheating, because it's an integrated card, but I don't know, does that happen?

elcid1390

In fact it does. I had a similar problem a few months ago. My computer (an off the shelf HP p6310y) worked fine (generally) but the video would slow to a crawl when playing games, watching movies, etc. I updated all the drivers, Flash, the whole nine yards. Than I installed Speedfan and noticed that the on-board video was really hot (85 or 90 degrees centigrade) when it was idling. When I fired up the Witcher or Battlefield 2 it would transition to stupid hot (110 degrees centigrade+). I think the heat sink was either cracked or improperly seated. I had a free PCI-E slot so I sprung ~$75 for a cheap video card and haven't look back since.

Essee

Furthermore, ANYTHING can overheat. I'm not really sure what the card being an integrated one would have to do with that. Computers get filled with dust really quickly, and that's probably one of the most common causes for overheating. It's not usually the video card in specific, unless there's really bad airflow ONLY around the video card or something's gone wrong with the card. Have you opened up your case and used compressed air in there recently? Since you said your friend set up the machine, I'd bet it's due for a cleaning by now (but heck, the desktop we built ourselves could use one again by now as well, even though we're used to doing this stuff). I actually just described doing this in another thread like a week ago, funny enough. It basically never hurts (if you handle it the way I was talking about there, and also that bit of advice about keeping the fans still while doing it which I honestly didn't know about), and it often helps a ton. Even if it doesn't fix the suckiness of videos, your computer will thank you. :P

I do want to add, though, that a conceivable reason for your Flash playback to suck could, in fact, be the fact that your Flash is up-to-date. There was an update pretty recently... I haven't noticed any problems myself, but A) we don't use integrated cards in my family, and sometimes people's machines react differently to updates for no conceivable goddamn reason. You could possibly try rolling back to a slightly earlier version of Flash and see if that works any better. I know they've been trying to improve the framework to take more advantage of graphics cards lately. Anyway, if you've been having other problems, this is probably not it, but it's worth mentioning just in case.