I have several old laptops laying around. One in particular that we can use for an example is a Dell Inspiron 3520. Intel Core i5-3210M with “Intel HD Graphics 4000”. It’s from the early 2010s, so over 10 years old at this point.
I was hoping to find some use for this thing, and one thing I had in mind was to use it for home media playback. It has an ethernet port and an HDMI port, so I figured I shouldn’t be too much to ask for it to just plug into a TV and do nothing other than just play some video files.
Unfortunately, it’s had a bit of trouble. Some video it can play just fine. But anything above Full HD (and even some Full HD files) it just can’t seem to keep up with. It starts stuttering with the CPU maxed out at 100%. Even with the file copied locally (not reading it over the network) this problem will still happen.
I’d like to playback over a web browser ideally. But even VLC and WMP seem to struggle with this issue.
If my rough understanding is correct, my guess is that without a modern GPU to support hardware/firmware-level video decoding, the task is falling to the old CPU which just can’t quite keep up.
Is there anything I can do to boost the performance of this old laptop in this regard? Is there some kind of USB or other external device I can use to provide better decoding performance (without a price tag so high that I might as well just buy a new computer)? Or something I could do on a software/OS level to somehow make it more efficient?
