When watching any kind of video....?

Question

it's not like a smooth all-the-way-through or steady stream of video. For example on you tube, instead it kind of skips every 2 or 3 seconds. I've already tried updating my video drivers, but that didn't help. Let's see, I use cable Internet, I usually don't run other programs while I'm watching a video. I do get to see the video all the way through, but like in a music video, I hear the whole song without trouble, it's just the video. Is there anything else I could do because it gets really annoying. Thank you for your answers!!

Answer 1

May I suggest you to check on your hard drive? This usually does the trick. When I first install my DSL, the tech guy told me not to make my hard drive too full. He suggest 50% would be ideal. And 80% will slow down your internet speed. It's like if your brain is crammed is almost full. It's difficult too download and search for stuff inside there.

Why I think you've difficulties with speed?
You hear the music. But the video skips a few frames. Usually the video file (track) is bigger than the music file (track). It takes more time to download.

http://www.askageek.com/2007/03/26/check-hard-drive-and-free-up-space/

The Cleanup

The process is simple and we start off by going to “Start” and then select “My Computer“. From here you will get a list of your hard disks and devices with removable storage (CD and DVD drives) along with some other data. We want to right click on the hard drive, usually your “C:” drive, and select “Properties”. Once we have done that we will get a new window to open, which will have multiple tabs on it.

We will start off using the “General” tab. We want to click on the “Disk Cleanup” button, which will open a new window and we will be put in the “Disk Cleanup” tab automatically. From here it is usually safe to just keep the default spots checked off and then press “OK” but if you want to clean up even more space you can look though the other options. For advanced users there is another tab called “More Options”, which allows you to remove windows components and programs that have been installed. Be careful because if you are going to remove a program you actually need then you will have to reinstall it and you might have lost some of your data.

The Checking

To check our hard drive to make sure it does not have many errors we want to scan the disk for errors. To do this we have to open the same little window we had opened previously by going to “Start” -> “My Computer” then right clicking on the hard drive you want to check and clicking “Properties”. From here we will want to select the “Tools” tab and then select “Check Now…”.

A small window will open and we will want to check off “Automatically fix file system errors” and “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”. This process will take a little while and you will want to make sure that you have no programs running because they will cause the process to take even longer. This is going to check all the spots on your hard drive to make sure there are no problems with them. If there are any problems it will mark the areas that have problems and it will not write to those areas in the future, which will help keep your data safe.

The Organizing

To organize the data so that your computer can get at it faster we do the same steps as when we did The Checking but now we will select the second option on the “Properties” screen, which is “Defragment Now..”. Once you select that option you will have a new window open up which will allow you to either “Analyze” or “Defragment”. The “Analyze” option is what we will run first. It will only take a few moments to run and you will be shown a report that will tell you if you need to “Defragment” or not. The nice thing is that this report is easy to ready because it literally says “You do not need to defragment this volume.” or it says “You should defragment this volume.”

This report will also give you other information and I suggest you take a look at it but for those of you that are not interested you can just skip the report and do what it told you to do. If it told you to “Defragment” then that is easy you just click on the “Defragment” button. Again make sure you do not have any programs running as that will make this process take a very long time.

All Done

So now at this point we have removed any extra files on the system that we did not need freeing up extra space. As a general rule the less data you have on your hard drive the faster your computer is going to run.

We also checked the hard drive for errors, which will allow the system to run better because it will know to ignore error spots in the future.

Then we organized our files so that the computer can get at them faster, which will make the computer run more efficiently.

This should have been a painless process and it should help keep your computer running it’s best.