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Users report streaming video issues with Windows 10, but is it the culprit?

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While the Windows 10 launch might have been a monumental success for Microsoft in many ways, not every user is entirely happy with their upgrade – whether it was free or not. Some users have reported that following on from changing up to the new OS, they’ve encountered a lot of problems with online video. Not local video, mind you — just online streaming.

What’s a little bizarre, is that their symptoms sound like hardware issues, as if the GPU or on board processor is having issues. This could be related to hardware failure, driver problems, or software issues.

“I had updated to Windows 10 from Windows 7. Every time I go to watch something either on YouTube or Netflix the video either doesn’t work or starts late with the sound going ahead of it. Sometimes there is just green screen with blue and red boxes,” said one user, quoted by TechTimes.

Others have reported seeing the blue screen of death (BSOD) with some even claiming the strange symptom of the video’s audio skipping ahead – which sounds more like dodgy video than any problem with the operating system.

Of course, it could well be a driver issue. New operating systems are prone to not being supported by everything early on. Sony recently issued a statement that users of its Vaio laptops shouldn’t upgrade their systems to Windows 10 until the appropriate driver updates had been released. Users who have upgraded need to make sure they have the latest drivers available from Intel, AMD or Nvidia, depending on the graphics solution.

Microsoft has acknowledged those with these video issues and has suggested that they use traditional troubleshooting methodology to discover the problem, as well as make sure they can play local videos correctly. They also suggested that everyone run Windows Update, to make sure that they are running the absolute latest stable version of the OS and its associated services.

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Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
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