speed up comp

[FritoBandito]

i have an older (5 years) laptop that often lags in PCLOS. It doesnt seem to be ram, its cpu maxing out when i watch videos... especially those on megavideo.

is there anything i can turn off to alleviate this issue? transparency or 3D hardware acceleration?

[T6]

it is more important here to know the system specs

amount of ram, cpu, video card specially

i have problems in megavideo too, if i don't go to fullscreen, things are horrible, usually is easier to just download the video with the help of a download manager, flash makes things slow and complicated but when loaded on hard disk and opened with vlc, all problems go away

the transparency afik, here is not important if you are in kde4, it can make things look ugly but i haven't tested that

3d effects can be a problem, are you using kwin or compiz?

[FritoBandito]

im not sure where to get hardware specs in PCLOS but: It appears I have a:
integrated gpu: Radeon Xpress 200M
cpu: intel celeron M 1.5GHz
RAM: ~700MB ram (but I cant find that spec anywhere :S)

I understand that downloading flash is better but i would much prefer to just stream them if possible without lag.
I am not using compiz so i suppose im in KWIN...whatever the default is

im just hoping there is something i can turn off

for instance when i browse through the program menu my CPU usage increases like 30%. And opening firefox maxs it out for a short time.

[T6]

if you have only 700 mbs of ram, that is a problem for kde4, it requires 1gb

the video card is enough for playback depending on the amount of ram available(you are low on that based on your 700mbs), the celeron m is kinda small this days but this is a laptop 

"im just hoping there is something i can turn off"

if you have kwin desktop effects, turn them off

"I understand that downloading flash is better but i would much prefer to just stream them if possible without lag"

when you download the video there is no lag, most times you can watch it while downloading it

i use jdownloader and vlc, jdownloader acquires the address of the video with downloadhelper, a addon for firefox and then i open the file with vlc who doesn't complain for file extension or if the file is complete or not

[Dragynn]

im not sure where to get hardware specs in PCLOS but: It appears I have a:
integrated gpu: Radeon Xpress 200M
cpu: intel celeron M 1.5GHz
RAM: ~700MB ram (but I cant find that spec anywhere :S)

I understand that downloading flash is better but i would much prefer to just stream them if possible without lag.
I am not using compiz so i suppose im in KWIN...whatever the default is

im just hoping there is something i can turn off

for instance when i browse through the program menu my CPU usage increases like 30%. And opening firefox maxes it out for a short time.

Ouch. Radeon express 200m, that's the problem right there to me. Had bad experiences with it. I would install a video card if it was me. Just my two cents, YMMV as they say.

[FritoBandito]

crud too little ram AND a bad video card.
Im not going to switch to XFCE or anything cause I like the PCLOS setup and its not that slow.

under desktop effects in "system settings" i have desktop effects off so i guess that kwin.

ok maybe ill try that flash downloading thing but it sounds like im stuck with my fate
I guess i was hoping that there were some graphics effects that my processor was performing which I could disable.

[scoundrel]

you could try another DE   like LXDE .. its light and pretty good with video and such.. I use it for my media system

[FritoBandito]

Am I correct in thinking that that would only help my RAM situation?

[scoundrel]

Am I correct in thinking that that would only help my RAM situation?

no

[T6]

"Ouch. Radeon express 200m, that's the problem right there to me. Had bad experiences with it. I would install a video card if it was me. Just my two cents, YMMV as they say."

it is a laptop, no video card change possible 99.9% of the time, read the post

btw, you posted in desktop section chico1st but you are asking help for a laptop

Am I correct in thinking that that would only help my RAM situation?

no

i'm afraid not, the ram improves general performance of the system and helps a little to firefox but flash is still flash, very bad in linux, that is why i told you to bypass it with a download manager

blame the video card here is useless, last friday i tried to watch a video in this machine, ati radeon 9200 and the playback speed was miserable so downloaded the video and worked perfectly

tried the same in the netbook with a intel gma 3150 integrated card and found same miserable results

both machines have a 1600mhz cpu but very different, one is a amd semprom for desktop and the other is a atom on a netbook

if you remember another posts in this forum some months ago, we were very happy when someone posted a flash alternative, open source, also the imminent arrival of html5 possibly replacing flash, this is the reason of our excitement about this, flash no more, no more low quality code full of flaws and recently security holes

[jakesdad]

On my HP laptop with the 200M video I have to turn off the Compositing effects to run Google Earth. Otherwise the display skips and flickers. BTW I have 2 gig of ram, 1.7 g AMD sempron  cpu