BUFFERING POWER--the one thing that has kept me away from ultraportable laptops. I'm always in search of ways to improve local buffering when I've done all I can to the bitstream itself. Sometimes Chrome gives me better buffering than Firefox. Killing all updates and anything else that might leech bandwidth also helps. I've also embarked on a Christmas goal--a new laptop--involving twice as much RAM as I currently use. I'm also tweaking my hardware acceleration (i.e., turning off hardware acceleration). Every media application needs different aspects of computer hardware. By turning off hardware acceleration, I can get better audio streaming resutls. That's because applications themselves will be able to set the requirements themselves and not be forced to use one universal setting. Hardware acceleration has been to known to cause choppy PC playback, application crashes and slow streaming video problems. Here's how you control hardware acceleration on a Windows PC:
1. Click on "Start".
2. Click "Control Panel".
3.Select the "Settings" tab and click on the "Advanced".
4. Click on the "Troubleshoot" tab.
5. Disable the hardware acceleration completely by dragging the slider to the extreme left.
I've also discovered that I can improve audio streaming by turning off video acceleration by changing the options settings in the media player being used.
But I expect all choppiness to be eradicated with more RAM coming into my laptop in 2010.
