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I just installed a new Windows XP on an old laptop. I did all of the updates I was asked for.

I installed the latest driver updates from the official laptop producer site. Now, when I try to use that laptop to talk on Yahoo! Messenger, the sound quality is very bad, and I barely hear what the other person is saying. Before I was reinstalling the XP the laptop were working fine.

Do you have any tips for me? How can I test the performance or find out what's wrong?

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Could you give the rough specifications of the laptop in question, just so we have a general idea of what you mean by 'old' ? – ldigas Jun 10 '10 at 19:00
Have you double checked that you have the correct and/or latest sound drivers installed? – ChrisF Jun 10 '10 at 19:02
Is it slow in general, or is YM the only problem? YM is the only issue you mention in the actual question text. – zildjohn01 Jun 10 '10 at 22:52
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I know this may sound like heresy, but I generally dislike installing the newest updates (usually I install just the ones I need - like that "hibernation fix" one), same goes for drivers, although with them it's sometimes harder. For example, sound card and graphics card drivers lately come in several hundred megabytes packages, and they can be really slow sometimes, even on newest of hardware.

Apart from that "general" part, I can but suggest doing disk defragmentation, and maybe using a registry cleaner to remove all unneccesary entries.

But even taking that into account, I do not believe the difference should be that great.

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Usually I will at least check what the update is first, I'd hate to leave some security hole or fatal bug risk open. – Ryan Mar 6 at 15:19
@Ryan - Unfortunatelly, my time is limited and they don't pay me to read descriptions of every update that pops up ... with that in mind, we've never had security problems :) but ymmv ... – ldigas Mar 6 at 16:23
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