I'm not an expert so probably can't help but... I think you have enough speed you shouldn't even need to let it buffer, but know how to do so, so it's probably not Internet speed. Your system seems fine specification-wise. To me anyway. I don't think or know much about video cards but I wouldn't think it would be the physical card, but I don't really know. My wild guess would be the driver. :) This is what mine shows when I go to "System settings"--->"Additional Drivers": If it were me, I'd try a different driver if there's any listed there. Maybe you already have? Other than that, I don't have a clue. I'm running 12.04 and youtube's and other videos play fine for me. If someone else here doesn't have the answer, there's always the Ubuntu forum. Just a thought. Edit: Just out of curiosity, does the snow in my "My Page" fall smoothly or does it stop and go as it falls? This post was edited by chuggerguy on Thu, Jan 3, 13 at 20:40

If your camera really is a mini-dv, to get the images onto the computer, you usually need a firewire connection, many newer computers, especially Macs have them. Sometimes they do work with USB too. Read the handbook or go to the camera maker's website, you should be able to download a handbook. If you want to, you can edit the movies and make a dvd all on the computer, if it's set up for it. Something like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie for the mac. If you don't want to edit, then a DVD recorder will be the simplest, and you can use it like a vcr to record tv etc. Most these days have a built-in hard drive too, so you can make multiple disks of the same thing. Apart from Sony, many other makers produce dvd recorders now. You will want to make sure you get one with a firewire jack so you can connect that way, it's the best and simplest, only one cable required.

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Hi Azinoh, Thank you for your advice. The amount of data is over 1TB once the video files are included. Pictures and text (word or pdf) files are much simpler - less than 10GB. I already have a new external hard drive attached to my pc. I've been copying-backing up files to there. I also have them backed up on the NAS - but I'm worried about not being able to access those if I can't figure out how to set up my synology diskstation right away. So I wanted to be sure to have access to the important files right away. I'm confident I can access the files on the new external hard drive from my new computer. I'll search the Canon site for my model. It's not that old - manufactured in the Windows 7-8 days. I actually thought it might have been too new for my XP computer to make that set up easy. Now I know I can check that out on Canon's site. In terms of putting the failing second drive in the new pc, I agree. I'm not certain it's actually failing. When this happened with another drive 2 or 3 years ago, I think it was a healthy drive. I think I was on the Tivo forums about this - and people thought the drive was fine. I don't recall why more files weren't displaying. So if this winds up being a limitation of my desktop's explorer program - or something that isn't a flaw of the drive, it might be worth keeping. But I never did risk it with that old drive, even though more knowledgeable people than me thought it was safe to use. So I probably won't use this one either. But I will try to pay more attention to what the problem is. Is Macrium Reflect something I can use on this XP computer now to copy files? would it be faster than using explorer? Thanks. Lynn.