Yes if you buy a better video card you will no doubt get a better picture. But as was noted above, no point spending money on a 5 year old computer if you plan on replacing it in the near future.

The last I heard was it takes $100 to fix a monitor no matter what is wrong. With today's lower prices on better monitors it might be wise to buy a new one and get a full warranty. You would have it ready for when you decided to buy a new tower too.

If I am doing something like .. downloading a torrent (Which I would Never, Ever do) .. and I don't have any browser windows open and shut my monitor off .. will my video card stop running? No probably not, the video card expects it's signal to reach the monitor. It has no way to understand you turned the monitor off. On my Windows 7 home build with a Gigabyte motherboard sleep mode meant everything stopped running and all open things were saved to the memory (RAM), tyhe computer was totally silent. However it has been a troublesome board from the start and I recently rebuilt using a cheaper Biostar board. Now only the hard drives and monitor goes to sleep similar to what other operating systems do in sleep mode. Most store bought computers today have the video built into the motherboard along with all the other peripheries from yesteryear. What do you hope to save, money on power or wear and tear? Just curious here.

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