Hey guys, I have the following issue: My laptop is pretty old

there are "light" versions of firefox you might want to check out

>>160577
Wouldn't reccomend chrome. Eats the shit out of your ram.

As >>160588 said. A "lighter" version may be better. You also might want to consider an upgrade though. Computers just get tot that age man.

Can you give us a screenshot of your system specs? You can use speccy or similar.

piriform.com/speccy

then just hit file and save as text, then copy and paste it here.

Could be any number of reasons, hard drive slowly dying, too many applications loading up in the background, failing hardware, viruses, etc.

File: screenshot_specs.jpg (49KB, 674x532px) Image search: [Google]

49KB, 674x532px

>>160683
pic related

Thanks for the help so far. I already tried light versions of firefox as well as older versions but neither could solve the problem with the stuttering videos.

What about a clean install of the 64 bit version of windows?

>>160753
A Penryn! I'm feeling the nostalgia. That and 3 GB RAM... yeah, surprised you didn't feel the burn earlier. Your box lacks hardware acceleration for the newest video formats, that might be a problem too (but shouldn't really be if you're not playing it at full screen). Check what the CPU usage is if you're playing video. If it's hitting 100%, decoding the video in real time is the problem. Otherwise, you've got latency issues and those may be caused by other things (like 8 years of software bloat catching up with you).

With only 3 GB RAM, you want to be really selective about what software is running. Use things like the Sysinternals Autoruns and Process Explorer tools to see what's hanging around your machine when it's not doing anything. A system commit of >4GB is basically going to kill your performance entirely. Laptops often come with manufacturer-supplied crapware; on an 8 year old laptop it's practically a guarantee. There may be things worthy of uninstalling if you haven't already done so.

Defragmenting your hard disk can also help. A fresh reinstall will also help, but you need the original install disc, you need to remove the crapware again afterwards, and updating after the install will take forever. If you go that way, I'd prepare a USB stick with Service Pack 2 and then not bother with anything after that but security updates.

>>160765
On a Core 2 Duo 3 GB machine, you don't want to be running 64-bit Windows. Software can't effectively use the extra address space and it's only going to be slower and take up more memory per process -- every byte is precious at that size.

A clean install of W7 could help a bit over Vista, if the laptop drivers want to cooperate. Of course, you'd need a spare W7 license.