How to make YouTube load faster?

[stubhead]

For some reason, my "new" Windows XP computer loads YouTube really slow, so slow that most times I leave and let it load and come back to it. My old one was much faster, it's the same DSL line and all, so it's got to be some filter setting somewhere. YouTube doesn't know anything...

 

[JaySwear]

i'm interested too. my laptop is slow as hell (with Youtube), but the new desktop we got seems to play video fine. both are new and decent models.

 

[Superlizard]

- clean out all your temp internet files (cache)
- remove any old version of Adobe Flash Player
- download/install latest Adobe Flash Player

Best I can think of.

Videos on YouTube are streamed through Adobe Flash player.

 

[Dan025]

is it a net book or otherwise have an intel atom processor? they are notoriously bad at processing flash. i only ask because you refer to it as a "new" XP computer and netbooks are about the only new computers that i see with xp loaded

 

[CrackedPepper]

My wife has a macbook and it loads videos/images/websites so fast it's unreal.  Maybe it is a WIndows thing

 

[nexrex]

OK, I'm probably opening a can of worms for myself here. I'm a PC Tech by trade, and as performance from one individual machine can vary so much (this is mainly because their is no such thing as a "standard model" and all desktop pc's are put together from various parts sourced from different manufacturers).

Anyway, my guess would be that this new laptop has very low system RAM (XP needs at least a gig to run comfortably), unfortunately this is usually the case with most PC, as I have even seen very high end machines, being built with low RAM. This is usually done to keep costs down.

The way to think of your PC works like this. Your HardDirve is like your brains long term memory. Your files are saved here, but no real work is actaully done on them. The are retrieved, updated in RAM (which is like your brains short term memory), worked on, and then saved back to your HardDrive.

 

[nexrex]

My wife has a macbook and it loads videos/images/websites so fast it's unreal.  Maybe it is a WIndows thing

The older model macbooks were great for this, as they actually use different processors to Windows machines. They also had very high/fast system RAM. Basically they were designed to be high-end machine, specifically to handle resource intesive tasks like video and image processing.

 

[CrackedPepper]

Still, I've got a Quadcore processor running Windows 7 with 8GB of RAM surfing on a fiber backbone and it is still not as fast as this 15 inch macbook on 802.1g.  

 

[nexrex]

Still, I've got a Quadcore processor running Windows 7 with 8GB of RAM surfing on a fiber backbone and it is still not as fast as this 15 inch macbook on 802.1g.  

I'm guessing it's software then. Probably your browser is cactus. I use Google Chrome and have never had problems with youtube loading videos on an of my pc's

 

[Dan025]

OK, I'm probably opening a can of worms for myself here. I'm a PC Tech by trade, and as performance from one individual machine can vary so much (this is mainly because their is no such thing as a "standard model" and all desktop pc's are put together from various parts sourced from different manufacturers).

Anyway, my guess would be that this new laptop has very low system RAM (XP needs at least a gig to run comfortably), unfortunately this is usually the case with most PC, as I have even seen very high end machines, being built with low RAM. This is usually done to keep costs down.

ah yes RAM despite microsofts recommendations for xp 1 gig or more is preferable but there are some registry settings that can help although i dont know if it would speed up you tube. the prefetch function in xp can seriously slow down boot times and program start times in an attemp to smooth out the programs themselves. basically it grabs data for commonly used programs at startup and for other programs at program start so it is preloaded in ram, so now you have a large chunk of the communication between the hard disk and RAM all going at once and not spread out as well as filling up the ram with a bunch of stuff you might not even use instead of keeping that open for application features that it cant prefetch.

there are 4 posible prefetch settings in the registry, prefetch on startup and application start, prefetch on startup only, prefetch on application start only, and no prefetch. i tend to set it for no prefetch, but application start might help more

type in "registry tweeks" into google, you might find stuff that has to do with internet settings that might be more helpfull.

also try google chrome or opera for the browser. and if you were to reinstall windows creating a small partition for the page file in the begining of the disk before the system partition can help it move data between the page file and ram faster as it can bring seek times down. set the page file to about 1.1-1.5 times the size of the RAM

 

[Dan025]

^disregard the last part if you have a solid state drive

 

[exaN]

Maybe switch browser, try Chrome or Firefox, there are guides on the web to make them even faster by changing some settings.