It sounds like you have flash installed. Anyways, are you trying to play the videos in browser or in an external player? Because the Mplayer and VLC plugins wont play flash video in browser even though they can play .flv files and while Totem/Xine/Movie Player can play Youtube clips directly, it can't do it at the moment due to Google playing with their servers to keep non browsers from accessing the site. It happens every few weeks-months, have to get an updated version of Totem to play it. Now as for Flash, Adobe's is the only official version, and the only one that's reliable for playback, but as we all know it's terribly slow, insecure and crash happy.. You can try Gnash or Lightspark as they are reverse engineered OSS Flash plugins. Alternatively you can try the Youtube the HTML5 beta https://www.youtube.com/html5 And add marinos35's Youtube WebM search plugin http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=Youtube+WebM Been Flash free for a while now, can't say I miss it. You mean 1Gb of ram or 1Tb of HDD? 1Tb of ram would cost a fortune and not be compatible with any Athlon64 X2 mobo, a quad socket Opteron board maybe...