Buffering at snails pass

Iv had my dell lap top for a few years now and even straight out of the box i was never impressed with it performance. Iv had many hiccups along the way but this is the first time that im unable to watch videos because the stream so slow. this started a few days ago, alot of commands where moving very slow as well like web browsing and such but then i started trying a bunch of different things fron your website and things are a bit smoother. Its hard for me to tell whether i did it right because im not really tech savvy. AS far as the videos, before it was slow and choppy but now its just slow. On your Stop Slow Streaming video page you mention how to turn hardware acceleration but the instructions are only for windows media. I didnt try to increase the virtual memory because i didnt want to screw any thing up. Im running Windows 7 by the way. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks :)