The Radeon X300 is a basic graphics card with only 128Mb RAM but even
so it should be up to You Tube video and iPlayer ! It also shouldn't
be a problem with 1Gb RAM though as ever the more you have the better.

What can cause problems with both You Tube and iPlayer is a generally
poor internet connection so what download speed are you getting ?
Check this with www.speedtest.net using a selection of servers and see
what your overall performance is like. Anything less than 3Mb is going
to cause problems with iPlayer and less than 2Mb is going to make You
Tube pause at times. You can also do a Ping Test which measures packet
loss and jitter ( basically a line quality check ) but that needs Java
installed to work.

I get a whooping 12Mbps and 1Mbps download and upload speed respectively. The
minimum I have ever seen is around 5Mb.
You mean just ping [website]? If so, ping command returns everything fine i.e.
no packets loss.
I was wondering that do you reckon 60fps from glxgears is a reasonable for
graphics card and is that something that might causing a problem?
Also, I read that X300 is no longer supported by ATI, hence drivers cant be
maintained by developers. Do you reckon this may be causing problems? I am using
generic "radeon" driver

Well the internet connection doesn't appear to be any problem so it
may well be the generic drivers that the ATI card is running under,
though as gord_lib says the bottleneck could be the CPU or even the
RAM speed. Adding a graphics card that has Ubuntu driver support may
be all you need and as your demands aren't that high then a mid-range
NVidia is the way to go. One thought, with such a slow PC it's maybe
an AGP card and there's nothing like the range available for this old
graphics format now, so you may have to go with what you can find.

My graphics card is PCI Express I think because of the output of LSPCI command
"00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root
Port (rev 03)"
I think i might have proved CPU is the bottleneck, yay!! lol. The output of
"sar" is as follows
00:14:24 %idle00:18:24 37.0100:19:24 36.2200:20:24
38.3600:21:24 38.2700:22:24 39.7500:23:24 24.0400:24:24
1.2700:25:24 1.7200:26:24 0.4700:27:24 0.57
If I watch youtube in full screen, then % idle values go down severely. I was
wondering that could anyone post their output for "sar 60 20", while running
flash videos in full screen? To install sar, you need to type sudo apt-get
install sysstat. Please run the video for at least 5mins.

The bottleneck is your CPU...............

I will run the diagnosis tonight with "sar" to
satisfy myself and post the results.
Just one more question, I read a forum suggesting that powerful video card will
alleviate the cpu bottleneck problem? Personally, i doubt it because GPU and CPU
perform two different things.

Sounds like your whole system is barely enough for Ubuntu at ok speed. I'd
consider changing to a much faster version of linux, such as Antix, or perhaps
puppy.

Something doesn't add up here, the Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor
1.60GHz is a socket 423 / socket 478 processor and as far as I was
aware socket 478 motherboards only had AGP graphics slots but the ATI
Radeon X300 graphics card is PCIe !

Can you confirm that the CPU / Graphics details are correct and
perhaps tell us the make / model number of motherboard ?

I am running xubuntu. I even tried installing Gentoo and problem persists. And,
as I said the cpu usage shoots up as soon as I start flash.
Barry, Laptop name: Dell Inspiron 6000the ouput of "sudo cat/proc/cpuinfo" is :
"model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz"the ouput of "lspci | grep
VGA" is: "01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility
Radeon X300]"the output of "lscpci | grep PCI bridge" is: "00:01.0 PCI bridge:
Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/PM Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)"
output of "sudo dmidecode " (there was more)Base Board InformationHandle 0x0200,
DMI type 2, 9 bytesManufacturer: Dell Inc.Product Name: 0X9238Version: Serial
Number: .9NM6V1J.CN129615954892.

I do not know what is going on. It should go through. Unless you are saying mean
things then it could get deleted.

Since this is an old Dell laptop that puts an entirely different slant
on the whole thing. There were some replacement video cards for this
but a) they will be very hard to find now and b) reports from forums
say that anything other than the stock card was the pits to get the
laptop to recognize - and you already have the highest grade stock
card in there!!

http://www.bay-wolf.com/videoupgrade.htm for more info...

So I really think upgrading the video is a non starter :-(

However, poor performance of laptops is often the result of clogged up
cooling systems. The radiators are very narrow finned and very easy to
get blocked up with fibres and dust - seen many instances of a totally
blocked radiator with a quarter inch of felt pad !! The web site below
is about how to replace the fan but the same applies to remove it and
check the radiator for being clogged up. A small brush and blow out
will often work wonders - also brush out the fan but be careful as the
fan blades are fragile ( if you blow the dust out don't use compressed
air without preventing the fan from spinning - it will go way too fast
for the bearings and wreck it !! ).

www.ehow.com/...ange-fan-dell-inspiron-laptop.html

Step 10 - where the fan is removed - is where you look inside and
see just how much c**p these things collect And yes it really is
necessary to remove the screen - some laptops demand a total strip
down and removal of the motherboard to do this job, hang your head in
shame HP :-(

Hopefully this will restore some performance but unfortunately you are
very limited in what you can do with a laptop - nature of the beast.

I think you might have hit the nail of
the head here. The cpu is making noises for a long time now and the temperature
seems quite high as well. I probably can use that energy to warm food! Quarter
inch of a felt pad! that's really something. I will let you know if I find a
dead chicken or something :)With regards to text formatting, I can see
everyone's carriage return and paragraphs etc.