Lag during gaming

I am more familiar with Macs than with PC's because it's what I have always known. However, I am not good when it comes to computer "lingo." I'm not exactly sure what RAM is, or what it does, or how it relates to speed, space on my hard drive, etc... So please help me keeping that in mind

So I have an 14" iBook G4, it's about 3 years old. I play World of Warcraft a lot. I don't usually have a problem with game lag, but I recently tried using Skype along with it so I can talk to the people I'm playing with. But whenever I do, the game lags out too badly to continue running Skype. Since I don't have a very large knowledge of the innerworkings of my computer, I'm wondering if there is any way for me to fix this problem....

I would appreciate any help anyone can give me! Thanks!

Jenn

Well I'd like to do that soon, but it isn't going to be an option financially for a little while. Is there anything that can be done in the meantime? Something I can add to my computer, or a program I can run to clean things up?

Reflow said:

How much ram do you have installed and what iBook do you have?

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under "about this mac" it says 640 MB DDR SDRAM.

I'm not sure what kind other than iBook G4.

robbieduncan said:

It's nothing to do with your machine. Skype is using too much of your internet bandwidth for WoW to get data to and from the server. Either get a faster (both up and down) connection of quite Skype when playing. It may not be an absolute speed issue with your connection, but latency and Skype is just showing it up...

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To get a faster connection, would that just mean upgrading the internet service that I have?

robbieduncan said:

Probably. What speed/quality of connection do you have now?

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ummm.... I forget. How would I check that?

Well one test told me 3.2-3.5 MB per second.

Another said 2978.1 Kbps.... those seem like very different results, right??

I'm sorry if I sound like an idiot, I just haven't found an understanding for this technical computer stuff yet. My dad tries to explain it to me all the time, and it sinks in only a little bit at a time.

Ok, so while making a test call in Skype, and with the activity monitor open, my data sent/sec anf data recieved/sec varied between 5 KBps and 10 KBps.... that sounds much higher than what I just told you before.... Am I looking at the right thing in my activity monitor? When I just have Skype running but am not on the phone, it sits at zero Bytes.

Well I appreciate you trying to help. I just know that lots of people run Skype with WoW and don't have a problem.... or at least not as much as I do. If anyone else reads this and has some suggestions or answers as to why it's a problem for me, I'd appreciate it.

For now I'll just continue running WoW and Skype seperatly, until I upgrade my computer or internet and then I'll try again!