[gars]

My first solution would be to stop using Windows Media Player. I hate it almost as much as I hate iTunes. It's horrible, uses up waay too many resources and it plays videos badly.

Download something like VLC - if there are certain video formats it won't play - find players for those specific formats (like RMVB - I don't think VLC plays that).

Online videos, it's hard to say - You need to send us a site as an example - sometimes it's just a bad connection - sometimes it's the flash plugin that's screwing up. If you're watching youtube - and you let the video load all the way, then play and it's still choppy, then you probably have some sort of issue - either with a driver or maybe something running in the background hogging up resources.

Flash websites are sometimes horribly written. I've noticed it before - I'd have a million tabs open, and it just starts chopping up - then I'll go into task manager and notice that firefox is eating up over 1gb of ram, which is just insane for "browsing the web".


and just to add, there's no issue using OEM windows - you just need to uninstall all the crapware/bloatware that may have come with it. no need to do a clean install of windows.