Flash plug-in : CPU salesman ?!

[Carroll Grigsby]

On Wednesday 24 May 2006 10:13, jagnogg wrote:

>>> whack


> Oh, man. I am SOOOOOO dissapointed. I just put together a P-III 500mhz
> with 640 MB RAM for my 3 year old. I installed kubuntu (for the first
> time ever - and I love it), then I installed Firefox and Flash. I
> excitedly told my son that HIS computer was ready. He immediately asked
> to go to playhouse disney to play some of the "Little Einstien"
> Flash-based games he loves, and it was like watching a frikken
> slide-show.

Hmmm... I set up an old computer for my grandchildren last year (they're 6 and 
3). It's got a bit more horsepower than you do (800 mhz AMD), but a lot less 
RAM (256 mb). The video card is an ancient Matrox G200 Millennium with all of 
8 mb memory. It runs Mandrake 10.1 and KDE desktop. They use it mostly to 
play installed games, but sometimes they go online to the PBS, Nick Jr and 
Disney sites. It works pretty well (and the 6 year old is _very_ proud of 
having to enter his name and password to log in). After I read your post, I 
checked out the Little Einstein section of Disney earlier this evening, and 
it worked OK. The only slowness that I observed was that it took a while to 
download all of the music and other stuff -- kinda strange because we're on 
cable. I used both Konqueror and Mozilla (Mandrake 10.1 preceded FireFox) -- 
not much difference. I took a look at CPU usage with top -- nothing unusual 
there.

> Based on other posts I've seen, it won't even help that much to upgrade
> the processor, which was to be my next step.

You're probably not looking for more ways to spend money, but perhaps you 
could find a used PC that would be better. Or, it sounds like a Really Good 
Reason to buy/build a superbox for yourself so that your son gets all of the 
advantages that you didn't. (After 48 years of marriage, I've gotten pretty 
damn good at inventing stuff like that. Of course, SheThatIs has gotten even 
better at shooting me down.)

> Is there anything else I can do to speed up flash? He basically only
> visits flash sites. Please don't make me install Windows on this
> machine. Please. I want something better for my child.

I sincerely doubt that Windows would be any faster than Linux, but then I 
haven't used Windows since I retired five years ago.

-- cmg