Speeding up powerbook online...

Stupot_

Stupot_

Stupot_

Soldato
Joined
20 Sep 2009
Posts
2,921
Location
Portsmouth
Hey,

I've got a powerbook G4, 1.67ghz, 1GB ram... Still my main computer for general internet browsing but basically things online are starting to slow down...

I guess websites are getting more complex, this is really apparent with any streaming video, standard youtube is just about ok but HD stutters, same with iplayer HD, vimeo always stutters and plenty of others are bad too. Sites heavy on flash stutter quite a bit too...

This happens in safari and firefox, I haven't used anything else. Are there any really lightweight browsers that might help this? Opera, chrome? Or any plugins/fixes that might help?!

Cheers,

Stu
 
You're probably out of luck. Changing browser won't help much because all the browsers will use the Flash plugin to play YouTube/iPlayer/Vimeo. Playing HD video is quite CPU-intensive, particularly via Flash. Offloading the video decoding to the GPU improves things a lot, and the Flash 10.1 beta has the ability to do that, but it requires a supported GPU and a compatible driver, and I'd guess the GPU in the Powerbook is far too old to manage that.

My dual-core 1.66Ghz laptop can just about manage HD iPlayer without GPU assistance, so I think a single-core machine is always going to struggle.
 
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