Videoconferencing problem with x40

[andrewstuartallen]

Here's a mystery that I hope one of you experts can help me solve....

I got a nice used x40 recently, partly so that my wife can videoconference with me while she's on business trips. It's 1.4GHz (Dothan), 1.5GB RAM, and I did a clean install of XP-SP2, reinstalling just a few IBM utilities. Performance is great.

Unfortunately, I'm finding that video sent by the x40 is either very badly pixelated (i.e., 80x80 or so) with SightSpeed, or very choppy with Windows Live Messenger. My desktop (Athlon 64 3000+) sends much much better video over the same network using the same camera and apps. Interestingly, a DSLReports speed test on the x40 gave about the same results (~400kbps up, 1Mbps down) during a video call as it had before the video call, suggesting these videoconferencing apps are not using much of the available bandwidth while running on the x40.

I'm stumped. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Andy