Videos crashing Macbook

[cheeryble]

Helpiing a friend.

Macbook about 7yo playing 10.6.8

Friend daily watches a yoga class from yogaglo it has been just fine.
Now after a short time it starts stammering then it freezes and crashes the whole computer.
I watched just now and seomthing came up saying to FORCE POWER OFF and restart.

My friends say it happens on other video forms like from stored torrents and Youtube.....however I just played Anthony Bourdain and it worked for 10 minutes.
When i played the yoga class the Bourdain kinda started freezing.
Just played Better call Saul it played 5 minutes then the video froze audio continued.

I checked Flashplayer is up to date although I don't believe regular videos use it/


Any thoughts?

 

[cheeryble]

A little more info:

I'm pretty sure I saw a VLC logo on the desktop so I'd assume that for playing the stored vids (which btw were being played from an external drive) but of course the two yoga class sites load and play as ordered.(via Firefox) so presumably nothing to do with VLC.

When I tried opening the yoga sites AT THE SAME TIME a stored video was running it tended to make the one running go weird like semi-freeze which tended to clear up when the other one was quit.....well until it ran into problems all on it's own.

They said but I didn't confirm that this can happen in YouTube too.
May almost seem like an inability to process information.

BTW last night Better Call Saul eventually shut down the macbook I saw it happen.

 

[cheeryble]

I've suggested a few things like resetting NVRAM and do the stuff in Disk Utility like permissions.
Also suggested Onyx.
Will be interesting to see if any of this helps, but given it's worst in Flash Player suggests a lack of processing power due to some clog-up.

Bearing in mind this was all running OK a week ago, can anyone suggest a scheme of testing.....or anything else?

Thanks!

ps: I've suggested that if all else fails a re-install might be an option (it would be done by a shop I guess).
If this happens would corrupt/messy files be cleaned up in the process or not?