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chikuzen wrote:
radiognome wrote:
.Was the "old" computer that old? Mine is from early 2004,
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You're a dinosaur in computer years. His was 4 years old. Computers are much much better and so is skype. Most of your view points would change if you had up to date stuff.
I have the latest version of Skype and a new logitech Fusion webcam. My rating wasn't all that bad, and the reason I rated the Skype software A instead of A+ was because it apparently caused problems with Internet Explorer 7 when I had Viewpoint Media player installed. I rated the entire package, Skype with the underlying technology, a B- because fast movements become jerky. I suspect that the bottleneck there is the cable internet service I'm using (Roadrunner) because without Skype the computer hardware is fast enough to give me decent video. Even on TV shows like Oprah where they probably have the latest state of the art hardware it looks like they tell the subjects that they interview to stand still.
Like I said before, Skype (and probably MSN or other video/telephone services) is OK for music lessons for flute and a lot of other instruments. For things like dance lessons it won't work though. Robert Royston, the guy who taught the actors in the new movie "Love 'n Dance", teaches online but has to use the "upload a video" strategy. Things might get better. Cable will have to spice things up to compete with Verizon FIOS and if they ever want to get an interactive TV service working like they say is coming in the future, the infrastructure is going to have to get [a lot better. That delay that's keeping you from playing along with the students probably won't get better in our lifetime though.
And be careful what you're saying, if you start telling your prospective students that they need a new computer on top of a new flute (of course plastic is an inexpensive choice for that) you'll start scaring students away. My 5 year old 1 gig RAM 2 Ghz computer works with Skype just fine, you might have to clean up some stuff first though. Skype says the minimum requirements are 256 M RAM and 1 Ghz processor.
P.S. Skype for Linux on the other hand I rate a D-. They just got video on it either early this year or late last year (the beta for video was a few months earlier), and I can't get it to work at all. I'd really like to because Linux is a much more stable platform than Microsoft.
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radiognome wrote:
And be careful what you're saying, if you start telling your prospective students that they need a new computer on top of a new flute (of course plastic is an inexpensive choice for that) you'll start scaring students away. My 5 year old 1 gig RAM 2 Ghz computer works with Skype just fine, you might have to clean up some stuff first though. Skype says the minimum requirements are 256 M RAM and 1 Ghz processor
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If your admission here that your 5 yr. old computer works fine with skype can be taken as a reference, then nobody should be scared away. If it works, it works.
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