Playing movies freezes my computer

right click on desktop-> properties -> Settings -->advanced

 

Well, JoeHobart, it looks like you've solved it! I've run through two movies with no problems. Does having the acceleration off have any adverse effects, or am I safe keeping it like this? Anyway, thank you, thank you, thank you, to all of you who have helped me!

 

Heres a snippit from microsoft's web site on the technology you have disabled. Ff you try to watch a very high rez, high framerate video, you will probably get some stuttering or dropped frames. Won't be a problem for your typical web vids tho. I'd say you are safe running like that until you decide to watch dvds on your computer (and maybe even then, if your machine is pretty fast)

Hardware-based Windows Media Video Acceleration
Experience improved performance throughout with the next generation of video cards that support DirectX® Video Acceleration (DxVA) technology. With these cards, the rendering of Windows Media Videobased content can be offloaded onto the video card processor, making video playback smoother and making video playback at higher resolutions possible. This offloading also leaves more computing power for other tasks.

 

Glad Joe figured this one out. The rest of us were looking for the wrong stuff.

BTW - javascript:navigator.userAgent: giving a result of
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) is excellent and just want you'd want to see. Certain hijacks would have added more stuff after 'windows 98)'.

 

Thanks again to all of you!