Real Player Action Erratic

Hope this is the right place to post this, or be pointed in the right direction. Real Player came with the computer and it has mostly worked OK until lately. Now it sometimes won't start or doesn't respond, but then a clearing of cookies and temp files seems to restore it. I have no idea if the program has ever updated and was wondering if I should just reinstall it. Are there better players available?

This computer is a bit of a dinosaur but it just keeps chugging along and fires up every day. It's an XPS-420 running Vista. The browser is IE9 which is way out of date and I am planning to install Pale Moon browser this weekend. Also, Real Player doesn't want to download anything anymore from YouTube, which has many interruptions when viewing clips these days.Any suggestions much appreciated.