I have a older laptop which works pretty good for it's age. My only complaint about it is playing any kind of video. Whether it is winamp, wmp, or a streaming video they are all choppy. Why is it choppy? I had a old celeron 500mhz desktop with 128mb of ram 4mb video and it played videos fine. This laptop has more memory, same video memory, and slightly slower cpu but same buss speed and studders any videos played. MP3's play fine though. Is there a bios setting I need to adjust or something? ASUS A7V8X Athlon XP 2700+ @ 2.17ghz 1GB DDR 2700 nVidia 128mb FX 5200 WD 80gb SE NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW

You can't expect a 333MHz laptop to play videos trouble free. Here are some points to consider: -Laptops are always slower than desktops. A 333MHz laptop is more like a 266-300MHz desktop. -Your 500MHz Celeron has on-die level 2 cache, which is a lot faster than the half-speed, off-chip L2 cache on whatever's in your laptop. -Your desktop's CPU probably runs at around 90% to play videos. It makes sense that a CPU that's almost 200MHz slower to run at 100% and drop frames. I doubt any BIOS setting will help you.

Modern video files are usually highly compressed - that is what codecs do. I doubt very much if a 333MHz would cut it - my old Dell at 500MHz can 'almost' play videos without stuttering Music is nowhere near as demanding Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie!'... till you can find a rock

as a comparison, i have a similarily equipped laptop and desktop here. 333mhz, 128mb ram. desktop plays videos fine, laptop stutters and audio eventually goes out of sync on laptop. both run the same OS, XP pro SP1 (i know, i know, i shouldnt be using XP on a P2 :P) its all in the hardware :) Dave

Sure - comparison by CPU MHz alone is only valid in the case of "all things being equal" Hardware can differ dramatically (as can codecs) Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie!'... till you can find a rock

sometimes the monitor driver can help this. In device manager what does it should for Monitor. if it is something generic like 'Default monitor', that is bad, somthing more specific to the actual monitor can help this sometimes.

Also, if you are using any sound enhancements that come with WMP that really bogs down old machines. Turn off all enhancements like SRS wow and the equaliser and that will free up the cpu. Also make sure that there is nothing running in the background. Mattwizz3 : ) Sempron 2600+ @ 2.2GHz 1Gb DDR400 Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe 200GB SATA 2X 80Gb IDE 256Mb MSI 6800 Ultra