Travelmate 8204 orbicam sucks. Very

Firstly, make sure that you have the latest drivers for the cam. Then, if the "choppiness" of the cam is isolated when you're chatting away with your webcam, you might also want to check that your Internet connection is good enough (768Kbps at least).

Then again, Acer has been notorius for bad products. I even had this Acer Aspire3000 once. Just one year later everything - one by one - started malfunctioning.