Inexpensive Flash Machine

K

Klynt

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 17, 2005
Messages
85
Hi guys,

I just bought a brand new monitor and decided to give my old LCD 22" to my girlfriend for Hulu and Netflix watching purposes. Unfortunately her current laptop absolutely hates anything to do with Adobe Flash despite being only a couple years old. I was wondering if you all might have some suggestions on either what the problem might be or a very inexpensive PC that can output Flash to her newly acquired monitor.

Thanks!
 
that thing has dedicated graphics (8400 gs).. There is no way that she should be having such problems.. My bet would be on drivers not loaded properly for video and or chipset
 
Klynt said:
http://compreviews.about.com/od/deskreplace/gr/StepNoteXT5300T.htm

Hers has 2 GB of memory instead of the 1 mentioned and has XP Pro installed instead of Vista. It can play back flash, for the record, but it's very choppy and if she goes fullscreen nearly unwatchable. It's almost as if the video card just isn't really working at all.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the hardware is definitely not lacking. Update to the latest graphics and wifi drivers. Also, try out the Adobe Flash 10.1 which will offload the decoding of flash onto the GPU.
 
Well, that was it. Apparently I was missing a driver set called powernow.exe. When I installed those drivers (I'm assuming they were for the chipset) I saw the AMD 64 logo which I thought was weird for video drivers as the site had them listed. So along with the fresh install of the nvidia drivers AND the powernow chipset drivers? It's working perfectly.

Question, this has been a problem for us for like two years and has resulted in terrible video performance from flash to playing games on her laptop. Do these drivers just provide the necessary power to the processor in order to function correctly? The reason I ask is that I either overlooked the 32 bit version of these drivers every time I went to fix the laptop or they simply weren't available. I feel stupid but I'm nearly certain that it being a Vista 64 designed machine I had real trouble finding the correct drivers for XP.

Thanks guys!
 
Heh, drivers don't necessarily provide power, but rather the ability for the software/OS to use the hardware properly. ;) With laptops and other OEM machines, it may be difficult to find all the drivers, especially for a different OS than it shipped with; but you can typically find at least the generic drivers for the components at the manufacturer's sites.
 
Yeah, I guess I just thought with the "powernow" name and the terrible performance I was experiencing I thought it might be throttled somehow. Anyway, it's working wonderfully now and she is happy YAY!
 
AMD's PowerNow is basically their laptop version of Cool'n'Quiet (Intel's version is called Speedstep or EIST). All it does is allow the system to lower the CPU speed (and consequently power usage) when idle instead of running at full speed all the time. It's a power savings feature, so that probably had no effect on flash playback. The updated NVIDIA driver is what your problem was. ;)
 
Well I updated the nvidia drivers, restarted, and still had the same crappy performance. However, when I installed the Powernow drivers and restarted, like magic flash is as smooth as ever.
 
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