Video Playback Quality is Degrading

Hello,

I don't know if this is a graphics card issue or not but thought this section was the best place to start for help. I have a 4 year old laptop with everything up to date and here are my specs:

Windows 7 Professional SP1 32-bit
Intel Core i5 CPU M 520 @ 2.40GHz
NVIDIA NVS 3100 M
4 GB RAM

The problem: When watching videos (YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, etc.) the quality is starting to degrade. By that I mean the picture will go in and out of focus at times and also there are somewhat pixilated shadows. It is somewhat intermittent but happens with every video I watch. There is no lag or freezing however. Almost all of these videos are 720 HD. I did try to go lower in YouTube to 480 but it made it worse, or so it seemed. I have not configured any graphics settings so all is whatever the defaults are (the NVIDIA video quality settings are set to choose whatever the video player I am using is set to vs. the NVIDIA settings).

One thing I think may be important to note, but no idea if it has anything to do with this - I have CCleaner and never have done a registry clean but it was done for the first time recently (with many errors having showed up to be cleaned or such), and ever since then this low quality video playback has been an issue. I know CCleaner makes a back-up of your registry and you can go back to what it was before, but I have not done that yet as I wanted to first post my issue and see what others had to say before I try anything like that.

Let me know if I need to post any further info that would be helpful.

Any help would be appreciated - Thanks!

Hi Maxie, sorry...forgot to include that info. Lenovo T410. And the NVIDIA graphics card driver version is 9.18.13.1269, which it is showing to be up to date.

I use Firefox and compared it to Chrome and videos play and look the same. Right now videos are working and looking ok (go figure when I need to do a comparison test - lol). Since this issue is somewhat intermittent, I'll have to experiment with different browsers and give it a few days, but not sure it's a browser issue from the looks of things now.