Bad HD (720p) video play back

[mikeymike]

You could try download a quicktime HD trailer and running through VLC (Quicktime 7x eats CPU for breakfast on Windows, VLC is much better - HD trailers stuttered constantly on my Athlon XP 2500+, and ran 100% smooth through VLC - I had a Ti4200 64MB AGP at that point).  It could be mkv, it's a format I rarely encounter.

CPU - P4 2.4GHz with DDR2?  Are you quite sure about that?  Not that it should make much difference in this scenario.

[mikeymike]

VLC - I think so, yes, at least I haven't heard of anything close to it before.  It doesn't do everything out there, but it does most of it.

About your RAM, if you hadn't said that you've got 2GB RAM installed, I would have suggested that it had SDRAM or DDR1.  With 2GB I think it has to be DDR1, practically speaking.

[mikeymike]

In my experience, VLC runs better on Windows than Linux