slow video streaming, 100% CPU usage, which component is the bottleneck?

[dwinches]

Greetings,

I've got a computer I built about 9 years ago and haven't upgraded the CPU/Video because it's mostly a general purpose computer and I don't do much gaming. Recently I've noticed serious lag in streaming some video (History channel, AMC) but not others (Netflix and Youtube). Resource monitor runs at 100% even shutting down all other processes. Problem persists in multiple browsers.

I'm running:
AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000+
NVidia GEForce 8600 GT
8GB RAM (upgraded about 3 yrs ago)
dual 21" Acer displays (upgraded 1 year ago)

Anyway, I'd appreciate opinions on what might be the hardware bottleneck, or might it be something about the codecs for those websites?

Thanks!

 

[Crixilian]

check your cpu temperature and task manager for any high cpu usage background process

 

[cats_Paw]

At waht resolutions are you watching the streaming?
Your CPU is rather old and it may not be able to cope with a high resolution stream.

 

[dwinches]

Only background processes with significant memory usage are the svchost.exe and other Windows components

Temps:
CPU 50C
GPU 65C
Cache 33C

Netflix/Youtube seems able to stream hires ok, it's primarily these other channel websites.

I turned off hardware accel within the Flash plugin and it seems to be a little better, but still choppy.

Thanks for the feedback