You Tubing with PIII 700MHz

I have an old mini laptop with a PIII 700MHz, 256MB RAM and an Ethernet Card. When watching youtube videos, it is very jerky. I don't think the internet connection is the problem as I have a broadband internet with a USB Ethernet Card. The progress bar at the bottom of the video is also full, indicating that the whole movie has been played from the hard drive. Is there anyway that I can play you tube video smoothly with this system?

Before anyone says it, yes I do have another laptop (C2D 2.8GHz) which is fast and smooth. But I like to watch youtube video on my bed and the other laptop is just too big and heavy for that purpose.

 

overclock the CPU.

 

you can try a different browser. Maybe chrome.

You can also try the HTML5 youtube player. Have not tried it much but its supposed to use less CPU.

 

Can you add more RAM? That's usually the bottleneck.

 

What graphics card is it running?

 

QFT. Add more RAM. 256MB will be pushing the envelope with a modern browser, flash and the OS loaded up. Doubling it will be like night and day. A gig would be even better.

 

A 700 Pentium III's motherboard will probably have the Intel 815 chipset which has a memory limit of 512MB. I have a couple of 700 PIII notebooks and they are limited in use. There is a difference in going from 256 to 512 but not earth shattering. Major activity on the hard drive would be a sign of a shortage in memory. Other factors are the video chip. Our old notebooks either have the pathetic Intel 815 graphics chip that uses the memory of the motherboard, or an ATI M4 Rage 3D chip with 32 MB of onboard memory. Very outdated eitherway, but there is a difference.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if RAM were the culprit. I know it is the first problem on my old 450 MHz, 128 MB RAM, Pentium II desktop that is somewhat choppy with YouTube, but does play it when its early 1990's Ethernet card cooperates.

My first specs question would be, what OS are you running? If it's XP, you definitely will need more memory. Even if it's Win2K, you're pushing the envelope (though I'd stick with Win2K if you have that). Windows 98 would be more likely to run well on 256 MB of RAM, and its Flash support is more than good enough for YouTube (Flash 9 is supported on Win98; YouTube needs Flash 7). The downside is there aren't security updates for Win98 anymore, and actively running security software would cancel the memory benefits, but if you stick to YouTube and have a router with a built-in hardware firewall, you should be okay. Windows ME is in the same boat as Win98 in security, but will use a bit more memory.

The browser will also have a small impact on RAM usage. I recommend IE6 on low-power systems, as it tends to use a bit less RAM with one window open, and that can make a noticeable difference if you have sufficiently little RAM. YouTube works with as low as IE5, so you may be able to eke out a few more megabytes by downgrading IE some more (being aware that pre-IE6 is out of security updates, so stick to trusted sites). But if you load just a YouTube video on a 2K/XP/later system, and bring up Task Manager, you'll notice it tends to use 70+ MB, depending on your browser (Firefox/Opera tend to be a bit more in my experience). With 256 MB total, you can see why RAM problems crop up easily.

'Course, if you are running security software, you may be able to just turn it off (entirely, ideally) and get things running much better. That computer isn't robust enough to handle up-to-date security software well, and that can use an awful lot of RAM/CPU on its own.

Note all these suggestions assume you are sticking to safe sites such as YouTube. If you tend to do anything on nontrustworthy sites in other tabs while YouTube is doing its work, these probably aren't good ideas. Then again, with 256 MB RAM, having a bunch of tabs open wouldn't be the greatest idea in the first place, no matter what sites they are.

 

Use internet explorer 8. It has the best flash support amongst all the browsers.

 

I think YouTube encodes user uploaded movies to H.264, and its just to resource heavy to decode for a old P3 notebook.

But if you really want to watch YouTube and other web stuff in your bedroom i recommend getting a Intel Atom N450-N470 netbook with a 1366x768 screen and most important, the Broadcom Crystal HD decoder chip.
This will enable you to watch 720p Youtube with Flash 10.1.
(once Adobe releases it)

Broadcom Crystal HD link is to a XBMC Media Center article, and it shows just how awesome this chip really is on a low end system.