Computer is a Dell T5400 Precision, x2 Xeon 3.16 processors, 8 cores, 32gigs ram, 1TB SSD...
I've been a diehard Firefox user for years. But lately I've been having issues with watching streaming video from news and other sites. I get perfect audio but the video is nothing but a slide-show; one frame, 4 seconds of wait, another frame, 4 seconds of wait... Everything was fine until I made the stupid mistake of, after 4 years of zero Windows Updates, I downloaded and installed the now-available full-library of updates. This computer has been, simply put, a piece of crap since then. Haven't tired a system-restore, as that would likely be a 10 hour operation since that's about how long the updates took to install.
Ive been wondering if it might be a browser issue? I've never had ANY trouble with firefox, but yesterday for fun I opened my rarely used IE11, and lo and behold I got actual watchable video on a news site! Then I gravitated to reading a few news stories, which always have links to fact-checking or related-story pages...
after clicking one of those links I was greeted with
YOUR BROWSER IS NOT COMPATIBLE
WITH THIS WEBSITE!!!!
AAGGHH!! --Good old MS BS forced obsoletion at work, which I'm simply sick and tired of. And I remembered at the top of the IE page was an 'update to Edge' advertisement. Since IE doesn't work, ya think? What the ad SHOULD say is "you might as well update to Edge because like with Win95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8, our forward-only never-look-back thinking engineers have purposely kneecapped IE rendering it completely useless for current and future use. So there."
SO-- why am I getting chopped up video in firefox but not IE? One piece of advice I found suggested disabling hardware acceleration in firefox - no help.
My computer is also getting to where it gets slower and slower as time goes by, to the point that by day's end clicking to open or save files takes several seconds- I've counted 45 seconds more than once! - for a reaction from the computer. I used to never turn the thing off, hibernated for months at a time with no issues. Now, after 15 hours I have to reboot. I used "Reimage", which makes for a drastic improvement initially, but after 2-3 days of hibernating it's back to 'swimming in molasses'. The internet tells me my computer is 'leaking memory' badly..? Can a manual memory dump be done without rebooting?
And just earlier this morning I tried changing my virtual memory settings a bit, I've noticed no difference...
The other day I re-arranged all my drives and drive letters in case I was having a drive-letter 'sharing' issue, seemed to help but the molasses set in later in the day...
I'm thinking I probably should just dump & re-install my Windows, but I'll need to get a disk...
If anyone has any suggestions...