Flash in Browser and CPU

I have been looking into this all day, but I still can't get it solved.If I try to watch it in the browser (like on youtube) it sucks up all my CPU. When I download a flash video and play it on my PC, it plays fine. Not perfect, but alright (about 30-40% CPU).The difference is less noticeable on my laptop, which I think has a better processor. But I still think the drag on my desktop is way more than it should beespecially since I used to use it all the time for watching videos (up to a couple of years ago when it went into storage and has now come back out). Even adjusting the video quality has little effect (unless I make the quality so bad everything is blocky).What's changed, and how do I change it back?ABE: I'm now using the latest version of Firefox. I had been using 16, but I thought I would update. I think the update made it worse. My PC is a Compaq Presario running XP Home SP3 with an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 2.2 GHz processor and 960 MB of RAM. I tried loading the videos on Netscape, but that hasn't made a difference. I can't install Chrome or Opera because they think my system requirements are too low...ABE2: I tried it on IE and it actually works pretty nice, maybe even better than when just played from the dekstop. The problem is that I can't use IE with hulu, and they tell me I can't update it. I'm using the onscreen keyboard now, so maybe when I get my keyboard hooked up I can do a better investigation into getting IE updated...Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

960 MB of RAM? How do you get to 960 MB of RAM? You might want to check into that. You could have a RAM problem.But even if there's nothing wrong with your RAM, with 960 MB you're woefully undermanned RAM-wise (even for XP) and it's going to affect many things. With every service release and update XP became more and more demanding of RAM. If you can get up to 8 GB, or at least 4 GB, you'll probably be much happier.I have no advice for your video performance problems, sorry. I don't know if it could be affected by insufficient main RAM.--Percy

Thanks for the information. I see my laptop has an Intel T2300 1.66 GHz processor with 1.49 GB of RAM (not much more than the desktop).According to this: (Yahoo! Answers) the unusual amount of RAM might be because of an integrated video card using a chunk of it for itself.I've read that even people with good systems have had this problem. But I'm going to crack my case open later and see if I have the space for more RAM and check on the price of an add-on graphics card.Thanks!

Ram could be a problem. When you run out of RAM, your computer uses disk space as a memory cache. Unless you have a RAM disk, anything written to disk is slow to retrieve. Swapping also consumes some CPU.Also when you watch video in a browser, you have to download it while you watch, a process which consumes memory and CPU, and of course bandwidth. It would not be all that surprising if watching the video after downloading it worked better.

If your performance has changed one thing to check is your hard drive. How close to being full is it? A full hard drive can result in a poorly performing caching system which results in poor performance running applications.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.