Having problems with Flash Video. Use Firefox? Try IE.

[flipteo]

Up until very recently - like maybe two months ago, my T42 was still meeting all of my needs. This made the fact that XP was on death's door, kind of annoying. I didn't really want to get a new computer, to run a new OS.

But then, youtube vids, and flash video of all sorts - even very low bitrate streams - started to play very choppily. So I thought "Well, this is it I guess. Time to start saving/shopping for something a little newer."

But since the change seemed to happen so suddenly I thought maybe it was just something with flash itself - maybe I could install an older version, and everything would be fine. Or maybe there were settings within flash that could be changed.

Anyway, long story short, it turns out, the problem likely lies with Firefox, or the FF version of Flash. I found lots of other stories from other people who were having the same problems. Everything they tried failed to work.

For whatever reason, IE doesn't seem to have this problem. I can watch videos smoothly and hiccup free. I didn't research it any further after I found my "solution", so maybe there is a way to keep using FF. I couldn't be bothered to find out though. Maybe someone here knows?

Anyway, just a little tip for others who might be having this same problem, to maybe milk a little more time out of these 10 year old machines.

[Johan]

Interesting observations; much appreciated!

It would however be interesting to hear what OS you are using (XP w/SP3, correct?) and what specific version(s) of Firefox and Internet Explorer, respectively, that you have experienced to function goood/bad as described? Also: Are you able to point to a certain Flash video where the FF/IE difference is easily seen?

As to keeping a T42 up and running for years to come, after the support of XP will soon be discontinued by Microsoft (on April 8, 2014), my personal experience is that an upper-end T42 (w/Radeon 9600 GPU) and/or a T42p (w/Fire GL T2 GRU) will run Windows 7 both fast and smooth for by far most daily-day tasks, such as browsing, e-mailing, writing etc., if upgraded it to 2 GB RAM and a SATA SSD. I agree however, that Flash is often not as smoothly played as on an e.g. i7-equipped PC.

Johan

[flipteo]

Hi Johan. Those are good suggestions.

Yes, I'm running XP Home w/SP3.

Firefox version: 27.0.1
Version of Flash in FF: 12.0.0.77

IE 8 - Version 8.0.6001.18702
Version of Flash in IE: 11.5.502.110

As to specific videos, that's a little hard to do. I mainly just use IE to watch streams of live sports. A dodgy subject, so I'll avoid it.

As to youtube, I just download everything, and watch in a media player. But I played around for a bit, to test this idea out, and actually, I couldn't see any difference in any of the vids I tested. So maybe the big differences I experience on the live sports streams is not solely a Flash issue.

[thinkpadhole]

I've also had this problem with my T42 ever since circa 2011, Flash on YouTube is just very choppy, sometimes it just stops randomly rendering frames smoothly during playback and it just gets very choppy, then it catches all the missed frames up like fast forwarding a DVD, sometimes the video just doesn't really work at all, but audio plays fine, and the whole browser jams up so I just have to kill it via task manager after which it works fine again. I've also just attributed it to rising hardware requirements on Firefox and Adobe Flash since my T42 has the piss poor M Radeon 7500 GPU which is just ancient, but I'll give it a try if it works better in IE despite how I hate that browser and don't have Flash on it anyway, interesting nevertheless