Skype voice chat quality degrades badly when downloading or surfing Youtube.?

Question

The background downloading seems to crowd out the voice connection. Is there a way to set aside a percentage of bandwidth and lock it so that Skype can use it and no other program can touch it? I'm using Windows XP.

Answer 1

you can change the priority of the application running in windows task manager.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Click on the processes tab, then right click the application, and set the priority higher than normal.

If you think its the CPU that is causing the quality to degrade, this should help.

I honestly think its your bandwidth that is causing this. I belive that in skype, you can change the connection speed / packet sizes. I would recommend bringing this down a notch or two if you going to be doing mulitple activies on the internet while talking over skype.

The reason being is that skype will use all the band it can, and if your streaming media, or surfing, eventually the quality of the connection will drop pretty low, simply because there is no priority set.

It is a bit more advanced, but if you have a high end router, you can set the priority of the packets for skype to be higher, thus the quality should not go down. If you can do this, the quality of everything else internet related will drop while you are using skype.

Answer 2

There's not a way to dedicate bandwidth in the way you are talking about. A problem might be your computer, and not the internet. Go to the task list, right-click, and set the priority of Skype just one level higher than it was previously. Don't set it too high, or Skype will start taking precendence over important system applications. Also, try to remove any unnecessary background applications, like AIM, etc. This will help as well

Answer 3

No, just stop multi-tasking.

Skype video needs all the memory your PC has.