watching web-videos raises cpu load to 100%

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Hi,

A friend of mine asked me to help him with his notebook because there
seems to be a performance issue when watching videos on youtube and
similar sites. The notebook, a sony vaio, is some years of age, but
should be still capable for web browsing. It has windows XP installed.

When watching videos from within a web browser (either iexplorer or
firefox) first it works ok but then the cpu load rises and rises until
it reaches 100%. Then the video freezes. Interestingly after some time
the load drops again and the video is displayed flawlessly until the
end. This happens with flash player and apple quicktime in a similar
fashion.

I have updated the graphics-driver, but unfortunately it didn't help.
Somewhere I read that the problem might be the video-codecs - there
are about 20 installed, but it's hard to say which one to remove. What
else can we try to do (apart from reinstalling windows ...)

thanks,
stephan

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