So with all the fuss going on with the release of Heart of the Swarm, I got a bit nostalgiac and decided to replay Wings of Liberty for a spell. The game was theoretically installed on my system via disc already, or at least the program went through all the motions (and took its sweet time) back when I put the disc in.

I'm not new to PC gaming, so I was unsurprised that there are plenty of patches that the game insists on installing before I can play it; it's been a while, and Blizzard tweaks its games just about daily. Having there be 6 GB worth of patches seems really extreme, but fine, whatever, it's modern gaming, and I'll leave the computer on overnight so I can actually play the damn game when I finally get a free hour sometime.

So with all that in mind...why on Earth is the single player mode so slow at loading, so choppy to play, and most surprisingly, why are the cutscenes all buffering like I'm streaming something off vimeo? I'm honestly confused and curious as to what exactly could be causing this.  Multiplayer issues makes some sense, but why on Earth is it acting like my single-player campaign game is only half-installed? O_o

Probably some memory-intensive program is running on the background or you changed your CPU.

It's certainly not the CPU: my computer remains unchanged since I first bought the game. I hadn't considered the memory angle, but once you mentioned it I fired up a couple of other games, and those seem to run just fine.