Problems using Video

I recently purchased a laptop. It is used and is a 1.73 Ghz Pentium M (Centrino) processor with a Gig of RAM. It works fine with everything except running videos or webpages with a lot of dynamic stuff on them. Simple pages it surfs pretty fast.

I have Comcast high speed service which is working well with my other computers on the network, wired and wireless.

The Pentium M tries to run the video and occasionally will for a while but then the video and audio both either stop or get real uneven and jerky garbled audio. I have the latest Adobe Flash (10 point something) and up to date on Java as well. In addition there is only about 7 gigs of files on a 40 gig hard drive and the virtual memory is set at 2000.

I have noticed when opening task manager in XP pro that the CPU is running at 100% usage whenever I try running video or more complex pages and takes a while to go back down while only about a third of Ram is being used which leads me to think its a CPU problem but I am a novice and wanted to see what you guys and gals thought.

When I right click on My Computer and then click properties it identifies the CPU as 1.73Mhz but below that on the same pane it lists only 795 Mhz and 1 gig of RAM. Does this indicate a problem with processor speed/performance or not?

Are people out there running video on a similar setup? Any other programs/ files I might be missing which is impeding performance?

Thanks for any feedback or thoughts anyone may have on these issues.

 

"it identifies the CPU as 1.73Mhz but below that on the same pane it lists only 795 Mhz and 1 gig of RAM."

Are you running the unit off of the battery or power adapter ?
If you are running it off of the battery the CPU speed could be reduced by the power saving feature.
If that is not the case it could be a "reduced speed" feature to keep the temp down, like "speedstep" for a Core2Duo.
When the unit is put under a heavy load it kicks up to full speed.

As to the viodeo problem it could be a couple of things.
First what kind of video is it ?
The video & sound are out of sybc.
That could be because one is being processed faster then the other or it could be the format of the video.
Keep in mind you may have 1GB of memory BUT part of that is being used for the onboard display.

 

Thanks for your reply.

The problem occurs with just about any video such as YouTube, game highlights at MLB.com , or say the news videos at any news site like Cbs.com.

It reads 795 Mhz below the 1.73 whether on battery or plugged into adapter.