YouTube Slow Buffering

[boffo]

I have two desktop PC's and two notebooks around my house and I just have a question about one of them I'm having problems with.

I have a Toshiba Notebook with 2 gig ram and Vista O/S and this machine annoys me because when I go on Youtube or some place where I watch a video there are a lot of stalls and stops while the thing is buffering.

I have a 5 year old IBM notebook with XP and 256 mb of Ram and it goes through Youtube videos with no problem at all.
The two desktop PC's also have no problem with slow buffering. They are also XP machines.

Just wondering if anyone knows if there is anything I can do to optimize the Toshiba notebook so that the constant stalling for buffering while I watch videos can come to an end. I don't understand how newer technology and faster processors translates into worse performance on YouTube.
Thanks for any ideas.

 

[newguy27]

may not be your performance at all. Your computer may have a trojan downloader which eats up your bandwidth slowing down streaming videos.

 

[WoodPeckr]

I have a Toshiba Notebook with 2 gig ram and Vista O/S and this machine annoys me because when I go on Youtube or some place where I watch a video there are a lot of stalls and stops while the thing is buffering.

My few month old Toshiba laptop with 2GB ram & Vista Home Prem, plays all streaming video & U-Tube fine. My 11 yr old Pent2 with XP & 384MB ram plays steaming video fairly well also.

At times it may stall a bit due to high cable modem traffic but for the most past the Toshiba laptop runs all video great.

How old is your laptop? Did you remove all the 'crapware' they load up new PCs with? Are there a lot of other programs running in the background, or all the time? Those things can hurt performance.

 

[thewheelman]

could also just be too many Vista resident programs eating up all your memory cache, forcing it to swap to the hard drive.
How is the wireless throughput ? (try a speedcheck) Switching to another wireless channel may work.
try disabling Virus scanner... new versions much more intrusive.

 

[basketcase]

I've seen problems today from more than a few sites. My computer wouldn't alow programs to use the internet because of the newest XP update (which is supposed to deal with that DNS problem I think). I have a feeling that microsoft screwed the pooch again causing incompatibility problems with their latest update.

 

[boffo]

The computer is about 10 months old. This one:
http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Toshiba-P205.htm

I barely ever use that computer. Mainly for one business application that I have, once in a while. And all websites I've visited on it are just mainstream ones like CNN or Sportsnet or music videos on youtube, because I don't want viruses to land on that computer if I can help it.

Think there is something in the computer competing for attention from memory or the processor.
Next time I buy a new laptop I'm going to make sure it can do youtube videos without a million buffering interruptions.

 

[WoodPeckr]

Since you seldom use it I'm guessing it wasn't optimized.

You could get PC Decrapifier (it's free) to clean out a lot of the junk they load up new PCs with now.
If all that stuff is running when you boot up it will hurt performance. Decrapifier will clean out the extra junk. My new Toshiba had lots of junk loaded to. If you haven't used it much it should be flying. Mine runs great.

 

[wowsitel]

Firefoc

Try using Firefox 3.0. It might help

 

[boffo]

Okay, thanks for all those ideas.