RAM, Surfing, Enhancing my Experience

eamon

Hello Folks

I have an oldish PC with 256mb of RAM. On many video playing web sites that I visit the (hope I'm using the correct terms) streaming /buffering can take forever and usually has numerous pauses. This tends to make the viewing videos experience rather poor.

Would having more RAM help?

Should say that I'm not afraid to have ago at fitting the RAM myself as my PC is long since paid for.

PC has 30GB Hard Drive & XP Pro,

yours

Eamon

DatabaseError

having more ram can never hurt (unless you are a sheep) and is cheap enough, impossible to tell you what kind you need, easiest way may be to check crucial.com or just take the ram out and show it to a local pc shop, though i suspect your streaming problems may be more isp related than pc (tiscali?)
try firefox browser, as this is less rescourse hungry than iexplode

russ_gillespie

More RAM is needed without a doubt, but I can't see it having a drastic affect on your video streaming. As tony says it's much more likely to be your ISP.

It's funny you should mention Tiscali, I have a friend with them and his streaming is dog slow.

isofa

If you can, up it to 1Gb of RAM, it'll make a massive difference.

What processor is the system, if it is really old, it might be throwing new money after bad, and you might want to think about a more complete upgrade.

foreversomeday

Do you have broadband or dial up? Do you know what speed you get, and do you or anyone else in the house use the connection to download anything at the same time as you are trying to stream things?

I think upgrading the RAM will help the computer run more quickly in general, but buffering and streaming speed are more likely to be affected by your connection speed.

Conor_3

More RAM will not make a difference to the video streaming - that's down to your internet connection.

albertross_2

512Meg or more will make the pc work much better, but doubt it make any difference to youtube etc. an indication of lack of ram is the hard disk light is on all the time.

IanCun

eamon wrote: »

I have an oldish PC with 256mb of RAM. On many video playing web sites that I visit the (hope I'm using the correct terms) streaming /buffering can take forever and usually has numerous pauses. This tends to make the viewing videos experience rather poor.

That is mainly down to your internet connection. More ram will help with other things, but it shouldn't have much of an impact on basic video streaming

eamon

Dear All

Many thanks for your replies.

I've got cable. Connection speed etc is fine and in line with what I'm paying for. What I might try and do is borrow a newish lappy (with higher spec than my PC ) and see if that makes a noticeable difference, before I spend any money on new memory. Though to be honest I'd really like to buy a laptop as I can get for my modest IT needs a HP or Fujitsu for under £300. However the mse'r in me says "don't do it"

Then again I may also be suffering from contention issues as I tend to surf at the most common times i.e. early evening.

Hmm

Eamon

rdpro

check your latency to the video site.

go to Start/Run and type CMD and hit enter. In the window that appears, first type 'ping<space>*insert web address here, like www.bbc.co.uk*'

aka c:>ping www.bbc.co.uk

and hit Enter.

see what the response times are, and note them.

Then type Tracert *web address* (as above) and hit return.

This records how many servers you get passed through to reach the final website, and should show a time to receive data from each one.

Too many servers will severely knacker your video streaming, as will a slow response from any or all of them.

Btw, get the RAM anyway