Hi my girlfriend has a bollocks laptop.

She doesn't understand why I'm angered by it, as if being hunched over a Post It Note sized keyboard and scrolling down every 3 femtoseconds wasn't enough, it has three niggling flaws that may be remediable, what do you think about these problems:

1. The sound breaks up and clicks, mainly when loading webpages or interacting with GUIs in general, making listening to music frustrating. Not enough RAM?

2. Full screen YouTube videos, even when buffered, jerk in a regular pattern, small they play smoothly, popped out and resized to near-full-screen, they play smoothly, in full screen mode itself they bug out. Flash bug?

3. Green artefacting in video file playback (avi, mp4, played with VLC) - dodgy graphics card?

XP Home - Liquorice allsort processor, marshmallow Nvidia onboard graphics, some cornflakes stuck to a piece of paper instead of a soundcard.


all suggestions for improvement welcome.

New laptop?

Doesn't help much, but my father-in-law finally decided to get into the world of computers and sunk 300 notes into the cheapest laptop they had at Argos. He came to me asking why it takes minutes to shutdown. I had to give him the honest answer that it's [LIFTED].

I'm staggered that something can be sold that is so utterly unfit for purpose. Any task you ask of it, from starting up to launching an app takes around three times longer than the time at which you think it's crashed. Okay it's not a lot for a laptop, but £300 is still a reasonable amount of money in my book.

We've been trying to coax him into computer usage for years. He finally took the plunge and now has been put off for life.

Just updated the Intel GMA Graphics (apologies Nvidia) driver.

Sound seems worse, like it doesn't have enough electricity to load a webpage and keep the soundcard working at the same time (I actually don't think this is far from the truth regards voltage stability, causing the pops, clicks and gaps?)

It's plugged in at the moment, you should try to use it on battery....

See if there's any public utility lost property reclaimation schemes nearby and tell them she's lost some bland office type laptop?

I'd take the ram and HDD out of it, switch it on and say, 'it's properly fcuked, look!'

Absolutely everybody has had sales on in the last few weeks, some cheap but good kit on the go

1. CPU is crap

2. CPU is crap, lack of hardware acceleration on the graphics chip.

3. Could be crap GPU or again lack of hardware acceleration. If latter, CPU is bollocks.

thanks for the heads up there and i definitely think you're right, just ctrl alt deleted during Romney Obama and the CPU was at 93% on one stream (smooth) and 100% on another (juddered to an unresponsive halt)

so, Intel Atom N270 can't handle basic streaming on a 1024 x 768 screen (Intel onboard graphics dragging it down to be fair)

Ah that explains a lot. The Atom can't really stream anything, especially with an onboard Intel graphics solution. Anything beyond basic Web browsing and you need to be looking beyond the Atom.

If you're dead set on a low power solution the AMD E series is a better way to go for streaming due to the superior graphics solution, though it's still not going to win any prizes.

Sent from my LT26i using Tapatalk 2

Regarding the sound problems, try turning down the hardware acceleration in the DirectX audio settings. Also check the interrupts in device manager - it could easily be a conflict causing both the crackling and the green artefacts, and worsening the performance issues. XP is supposed to be able to share IRQs but it's never a good idea, and the hardware often suffers.


My tiny little netbook which cost £130 about 3 years ago has that setup, and no. It can't do Youtube at full screen at full frame rate any more. Mine manages about 10fps.

However - it did used to! They keep messing about with Flash video making it more processor intensive. Try playing back at the lower resolution of 240.

On the other hand, my Acer net top with the same Atom but Nvidia ION graphics could handle 1080p at 30fps provided the data rate wasn't too high. The Atom could feed it up to about 2megs a second. Hardware acceleration FTW.

I generally find that the Atom is fine for most things apart from video, provided you have enough memory. My netbook has 4gigs of ram and an SSD. I absolutely love it, and use it as my every day laptop at work because it's so light and portable. Although mine has a fantastic keyboard, screen and speakers... which it sounds like hers doesn't...

The above image makes no sense to me


The audio appears to share an IRQ though?

You appear to be posting from 2001.
Of course you can't expect performance to match the needs of the internet in 2012.

I expect it to be able to play video and sound files from 1950-2003 though, that's a lot of Scorsese films and Simon and Garfunkel that I should still be able to enjoy that are glitching.

I ahve a samsung NC10 - a cracking netbook but it cannot play video that has been encoded in Hi def - I could upgrade the RAM / HDD but its a works lappy so I am not spending any money on it

I am hinting to "Santa" that a nice tablet (or even better an ultrabook) would be a good Xmas gift

You'd need a hardware adaptor to play the celluloid from 1950, but the low res QT and Microsoft stuff encoded in 2003 should play fine.

You'll probably also find that modern video ripped off Youtube at the standard 360p plays fine full-screen in VLC. The Flash player on the website really is heinously inefficient.

</serious response>


Indeed - with the video no less, which can cause crackling audio and green artefacts in video. Although IRQs can be shared in XP, it's impossible for for all devices to use them at the same time. This causes a loss of information when data rates are high. It's fine for slow devices, but rubbish for video, sound and hard drives.

It's even worse with cheap audio which has small hardware buffers, which is why turning off/down hardware acceleration sometimes helps get around the crackling.

You should be able to change it. You may have to piddle about a bit in the bios if you can't change it there. I can't see any legacy devices you could disable to free one up, but maybe 14 or 15 are available already?