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A friend wants me to fix her laptop and make it usable. I know it's very old, but maybe it can handle web browsing at least :) I gave up on installing Windows 7 patches because it looked like it will take forever, so I installed Xubuntu on it as it is quite lightweight.

Unfortunately the problem is YouTube is unusable. Even 360p videos are very choppy. I tried Firefox with the h264ify extension which should disable the VP9 codec but it was still horrible. In the Chromium browser it plays via VP9 and is less horrible but still unwatchable.

It has an Intel Atom CPU 1.33GHz. Unfortunately it seems the EHS overclocking does not work in Linux.

Any ideas about how to make YouTube watchable?

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  • The best you can do is install Win7 and the Intel Graphics drivers. Support for Linux ended a long time ago. But even with drivers in Win7 the best you can expect is 480P.
    – user931000
    Commented Sep 10, 2018 at 21:37
  • 2
    Good grief, that thing only comes with 1 GB of DDR2 RAM? You're better off not wasting anymore time with that thing.
    – DrZoo
    Commented Sep 10, 2018 at 21:46
  • Play youtube videos with mpv!
    – Ipor Sircer
    Commented Sep 10, 2018 at 22:15

3 Answers 3

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Those Atom "netbooks" were always very under-powered... even when they were fresh out. (See Windows 7 Starter).

Unfortunately I'd recommend you discard it and get something better...

However, before you start leaping for joy at the sheer genius of it all, there are compromises to be made. If the 1.6GHz Intel Atom processors were pushing the boundaries of acceptable performance, the 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 in the 1101HA laughs in your face and shouts “I can go slower”. source

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The processor in those machines is incredibly weak by todays standards and the graphics chip does not support hardware decoding of h.264.

It contains an Intel Atom z520 clocked at 1.3GHz that would put up a poor fight against a pocket calculator or the cheapest smartphone.

It also has an Intel GMA 500 graphics chip that just about manages HD MPEG2:

It is usually paired with an Intel Atom CPU and designed for video playback tasks (even HD content). The integrated video decoder is able to accelerate MPEG-2, VC-1, and AVC HD videos.

H.264 is much more computationally demanding than MPEG2 and hardware designed to decode one cannot decode the other without support.

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The Intel Atom Z520 in your computer is a very, very slow processor.

As I write this, I'm running a cheap Lenovo netbook (Flex 4-1130) with a newer (but still Atom-type) Celeron N3350. This processor boosts to 2.1-2.4 GHz depending on workload, and it's just fast enough to be reasonably usable under Linux. Compared to what I have, the Z520 has multiple disadvantages:

  • It doesn't support 64-bit operation. Nearly every processor used in PCs today support 64-bit instructions and higher performance, but the Atom Z520 lacks this feature.
  • The Intel GMA 500 integrated graphics on your system do not support H.264 or VP9 decoding in hardware. (The processor itself lacks a GPU and relies on a basic graphics accelerator on the motherboard.) Most newer GPUs, integrated or otherwise, have this feature; without hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding, video playback will be entirely dependent on the (very slow) processor cores. Newer GPUs (including the Celeron N3350 in my netbook) also support hardware VP9 decoding.
  • It's an in-order processor. Many modern processors can analyze the instruction stream to find instructions that do not depend on each other and execute them while other instructions are in progress or waiting, possibly in a different order than what the program specifies. This is called out-of-order execution, and while it can greatly increase performance, very low-power processors may omit this feature and execute instructions strictly in order as out-of-order execution is a complex feature that can require significant amounts of power. Early Atom processors, including the Z520, lack this ability, which means it gets less work done per clock cycle. For more information on out-of-order execution, see this answer on processor architecture.
  • Most fundamentally, the processor simply lacks any real performance, especially by today's standards. The Atom Z520 has a low clock frequency of 1.33 GHz, with no boosting capability, and is single-core (albeit with Hyper-Threading), meaning that even the lightest web-browsing or productivity workloads will saturate the processor.

To make matters worse, you only have 1 GB of memory. My netbook has 2 GB, which is the bare minimum needed for an acceptable everyday-use experience (and I had to resort to placing the swap space on a USB 3.0 SSD for performance reasons). While many desktop Linux distributions will cope with 1 GB of memory, you will be hitting the swap space a lot.

The only thing I can recommend at this point is to upgrade your computer. The system you have is significantly slower than even a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, let alone a typical modern smartphone.

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