As often happens when I try to use my computer as a television I ran into a glitch tonight. I was looking to watch an episode of an HBO television show on my PC. I opened the file in Windows Media Player and it was incredibly choppy whenever I increased the size to "Full Screen". So Sarah and I watched at the smaller window size and got stiff necks trying to stretch into a position where we could see the little TV box on the monitor. I tried solutions like increasing the priority of Windows Media Player in the task manager and killing processes that didn't look useful and stopping those things like Skype that always start on the boot but had no luck in resolving the problem.

So I got up in the middle of the night thinking maybe a defragmentation would resolve the problem. I went to defragment and since it is a Windows 2000 Pro box with 80 Gig of disk space I had a lot of time on my hands. So I looked around for how to stop things from starting-up. The best solution is the tool called System Configuration Utility. It doesn't come with Windows 2000 but seems compatible. I downloaded a version of msconfig.exe and used it to uncheck / disable all of the pesky things that boot with the computer including a couple that looked like they had malware objectives. I rebooted and checked the file that was choppy in Windows Media Player and lo and behold it wasn't choppy. So hopefully it is resolved for now and I don't need to rebuild the whole PC just to watch a TV show on it.