Pretty much every media file I try to view online, like in YouTube, or on a news site, or sports site, goes like this...

I click play and I hear the hard drive begin to race, and then the mouse pointer becomes uncontrollable--jumping around, any media that actually plays is choppy at best, at worst starts and stops so badly that it's pointless to try to watch. Sometimes I can get the pointer to land on the pause button and pause the video until the thing seems to "load" and then it will play normally.

I have a 2006 Dell Dimension DM051, Pentium R D CPU 2.66GHz, 1.00 GB of RAM

Could this be a problem with plugins or drivers, or with my hard drive? I have taken all steps to clean my pc as well, and it is not infected as far as I can tell.

Thanks for any help... it wasn't like this when I first got it.... but it's driving me crazy!

You seriously need to check this thread out and do as it says:

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/Must-Read-B...-Log-t2852.html

After doing so you should know if you have anything on your system causing this. Which is exactly what I suspect... If not it's got to be your hard drive dying. I would go ahead and reinstall windows if you find no infections using the instructions at the link above^^^.