My latest confrontation with my PC involves very choppy video. It doesn’t matter what player I use. Windows Media Player, QuickTime and Winamp all played most of my videos choppy. It also happened when I played video using a Flash player on some sites. I knew my hardware wasn’t a problem. I upgraded the drivers for my NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT video card, checked for spyware, and even reinstalled Flash. Still the problem persisted.

I knew that video codecs become outdated and you have to ensure you have the latest versions installed at all times. I thought that I had the latest versions. Well, it turned out that I had very old versions of the Xvid and DivX video codecs installed on my computer. I had installed an ‘all-in-one’ suite of codecs supplied by a third party months ago and forgot abou tit. That’s what installed all the older versions.

I had to upgrade Xvid and DivX, and the problems were immediately solved.