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Q: I have a Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista. Whenever I try to watch a YouTube video, the picture fills up with little pixels or small matrices and messes up the picture. This happens with other videos besides YouTube too. I think I am current on all my programs, but maybe not? This has been going on for quite a while and it is really getting aggravating. Can you help?

– John M.
Crestview, Florida

A:  Probably.  Before I do, however, I’m going to take to opportunity to chide you for still running Vista.  At the time it was published, Vista was the most widely panned version of Windows to date (and that was after Windows ME had already come and gone!).  For all I know, trying to run an older OS like Vista might be part of your problem.  Now that I think about it, if your system originally came with Vista, that places it circa 2008 or 2009, which makes your PC five or six years old.  That’s pretty old for a computer.  You can make an awful lot of problems go away by replacing an old computer with a new one.  (Ooh – that’s a great Geek quote!)

Okay, on to your problem! What you are seeing are called video artifacts.  When you watch YouTube content and the “other videos” you mentioned (nudge, wink), these video files are not being downloaded and then played back off your hard drive.  Rather, they are being “streamed” from the video service straight to your video player.  If there is any break in the stream, it manifests on your monitor in the form of blockiness, skipped frames, herky-jerky play rate, or the playback might stop altogether.  “Breaks in the stream” can be caused by several things, including a computer that’s too slow to process the video data being received, an Internet connection that’s too slow to receive the video stream at the rate it’s being sent, or other software running on the computer that’s using either too much CPU, or too much Internet bandwidth, resulting in one of the first two problems.

The first place you need to look is to your ISP, or Internet Service Provider. ISPs generally sell data plans based on the maximum speed at which they deliver data.  If you are paying for a 1 Mbps (that’s Megabits per second) connection, it’s unrealistic to expect to be able to flawlessly stream a high-definition movie, which can require 4-5 Mbps.  If you’re paying for a large capacity connection, also remember that that data pipe is being shared by every other device connected to your network.  Every Smartphone, game console, pad computer, Blueray player, or other ‘Net-enabled appliance is slicing off a piece of bandwidth for itself.  Also, the speed to your computer is limited by the slowest network segment that the data have to pass through.  In other words, while your cable modem’s connection to the Internet may be, say 20 Mbps, you may have older LAN or Wifi hardware that limits your speed to 10 Mbps, or even slower.

So my advice to you is to first make sure your computer is up to the task of displaying the content you’re going after. Get rid of superfluous stuff running in the background, and make sure you don’t have any malware taking up resources.  Then, go out and test your speed.  Here’s a link to a page full of broadband speed test sites that will help you determine exactly what your actual available bandwidth is: tinyurl.com/3ul9no5.  Use a couple of these, and if you find your connection just isn’t up to par, contact your ISP.  I’m sure they’ll be delighted to talk to you about upgrading your service.  (Seriously, sometimes you can get deals from them if you haven’t upgraded for a while – especially if you hint that you might take your business elsewhere.)