Part of the problem here is to good old USB bus, especially if you’re plugging the camera in to an old-school USB 1.1 bus — the older bus simply doesn’t have the throughput to handle streaming video properly, and the newer faster version of USB may be distracted by other devices (keyboards, mice) making use of the same bandwidth. And remember that your computer’s ability to stream video smoothly will also depend on your computer’s other resources being free: if you’re already maxing out your system’s RAM, you probably won’t be able to stream smoothly even if the USB isn’t the bottleneck.

First thing I’d suggest is to make sure both your webcam and USB port are USB 2.0. You can also bring up your Task Manager (right click your task bar at the bottom and select Task Manager from the menu)and clicking on the Performance tab — it will tell you how much physical RAM is in your system and whether you’re pushing the limits. If you are, you might want to upgrade your system RAM.