Old hardware brought back to life

[JLUbunt]

Thanks
I'll have a go this week.

[wandalalakers]

The only thing that frustrates me about bringing old hardware back to life is family members who don't understand linux and complain. I put linux on two old desktops for family members and ended up putting XP back on their desktops.

[mörgæs]

Often teaching people and helping them to overcome their fear is the biggest task. Could take several weeks after the install.

[charitosha]

Hello,
There is an old acer laptop, travelmate 251lc_dt.
It has pentium 4 at 2,5 GHz, Intel 82852/855GM, and 512 Mb of RAM. It runs Lubuntu 14.04.1 LTS. It runs fast I can have multiple windows on both "desktops" even with miltiple tabs on firefox on both "desktops". Only one thing spoils it, It cannot play youtube videos at all! I mean it has good cpu with good amount of ram.
I get this pop-up every time i try to play a video on youtube:

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: http://s.ytimg.com/yts/jsbin/www-en_US-vfl8O7vjo/base.js:23

To be honest i think i made it worse when i did:

sudo apt-get install zram-config

I'm saying this because prior to that i could play youtube videos but not in fullscreen.
Any suggestions???

[sudodus]

It may be hard to play video with only 512 MB RAM. So I think you cannot expect more performance than you had without zram. I suggest that you remove zram, as it obviouly caused problems for you.

sudo apt-get remove zram-config

and try again.

The best solution would be to add RAM, at least another 512 MB, but the computer would work even better with another 1 MB. I have an old IBM Thinkpad T42 with Pentium M and 1.25 GB (1280 MB) RAM, and it works reasonably well, but it is not playing any high resolution video (the CPU is too slow and there is no advanced graphics chip).

[charitosha]

after removing zram i was able to watch youtube videos again (without sound letancy) at the small window of course.
Being unable to watch it fullscreen i think it's the graphics chip fault, since task manager shows that only half of the ram available is being used...

P.S. what the difference of zram compared to a swap partition?

[sudodus]

See this link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

[mörgæs]

Changing swap settings is only relevant if one sees a lot of hard disk activity. If something else than the hard disk is the bottleneck the settings can be left as they are.

[charitosha]

Simply want to add that youtube videos played much better (they even played on fullscreen) after install intel graphics drivers for linux.
it took big amount of time to update, but after reboot the difference was very noticable.

[sudodus]

Simply want to add that youtube videos played much better (they even played on fullscreen) after install intel graphics drivers for linux.
it took big amount of time to update, but after reboot the difference was very noticable.

Please describe which driver you installed, and where you found it