Wanna Go Fast
Julie was packing up her stuff to leave school the other day and dropped her laptop. Fortunately it was turned off, and no damage was done. This is because she is a nice person, and goodness and mercy will follow her all her days, while I shall dwell in the house of Circuit City.
No, I didn't actually drop my laptop. I was reaching behind to plug in my printer cable and sort of nudged it. Gravity being fairly strong this time of year, it tumbled directly onto my wireless card. Internet go bye.
(I have to add something here. In addition to my laptop accident, a few days ago I came out of the grocery store with my arms full, stepped on the corner of the wheelchair ramp at the entrance, and went sprawling onto the parking lot, groceries everywhere, landing on my formerly reconstructed shoulder. Just a little klutz update. I am becoming Meg.)
I don't like to be disconnected from the 'net. I do not like it at all. Also, there are some income-producing issues.
Since I obviously squished some innards, I had to go with a UBS adapter, which seems to be working okay, but I still regret a little that I bought this machine in the nascent WiFi days (i.e., three years ago) before wireless went internal without asking please.
Bringing me to a question for any of you savvy readers in computerese. The rest of you can stop reading now if you want.
This is a very inexpensive, entry-level laptop with one interesting twist (I'll get to it). Since lately I've been doing some serious processing work, I cleaned up my chintzy hard drive (30Gb) to about 70% free, made sure I was adware/spyware free (I also downloaded Windows Defender, which seems to be working the way it's supposed to), and added RAM (now 640MB). Everything just clicks along fine, very fast, BUT...
I can't watch streaming video.
I can upload streaming video, and you guys can watch it, but I can't.
Oh, I can watch it. And sometimes even, particularly late or early, it's decent, but usually it's incredibly balky, as jerky as Steve Martin in his first feature film. I usually give up, and if I really want to see something online I use Julie's computer, or John's iMac, which just whizzes, even in full screen mode. Even though we're all on the same wireless network and in the same house, and sometimes in the same room.
Ah, Chuck, you're saying right now, it's your processor. So get this: I have a 2.4GHz Intel Celeron. 2.4. Compared to Julie's 1.6 and John's 1.8.
Maybe the Celeron is an inferior chip; I dunno. But if anybody has a clue as to why video streams, and only video streams, are slooooow for me, I'd appreciate it.
In return, next time I'll tell you about my close encounter with the Devil, who wears many hats but sometimes looks like this:
5:54:52 PM 
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