Understanding how things work

[timothy2180]

I have a question and I did not know where to go with it. I decided this forum was the best option.

When you load something on the internet, or when you are on youtube, and a video is 50% loaded, where is that 50% of the video stored? Is it in my RAM? Is it downloaded to my hard drive in a temporary folder?

Does anything besides my internet connection(and NIC) affect how fast data is loaded i.e. RAM, CPU, mb?

Thanks.

 

[tigsounds]

The 50% (or all of it) is usually stored in the hard drive in the system temporary folder.

Your Internet connection speed is the single biggest factor in how fast things will download.

 

[fullforce]

the speed of the system buses will effect it but the buses are so extremely fast compared to internet connections that you wont ever notice it, the speed is really download to the internet connection like @tigsounds said

 

[Catsrules]

Does anything besides my internet connection(and NIC) affect how fast data is loaded i.e. RAM, CPU, mb?

As far as downloading stuff, not really. like fullforce said the bottleneck is almost always your internet connection.
But like watching online videos, it takes alot of power to decode and play the video back. So if you have a crapy CPU and no hardware acceration then your videos will be choppy and not smooth. I get that alot with a net book I have.

 

[timothy2180]

Best answer selected by timothy2180.