I'm somewhat new to using the google "hangouts" video conferencing. I've only attended three of these conferences. They are good, but I'm still getting things fathomed.

The video breaking up or being delayed doesn't really matter, but I found the poor audio at times was rather annoying. During the last conference I monitored my laptop and found both cores were sitting at 100% busy. Admittedly its only a 1.86GHz dual core. Thus this is probably why the audio was breaking up. Fortunately, with 8GB of RAM, I didn't run out and start swapping as I'm sure that would have sunk me.

I suspect that I already had too many applications open on my laptop that were consuming CPU and RAM resources before I commenced the video conferencing. i.e. I had over 100 Mozilla Firefox tabs open. Before the next video conference that I join I intend to reboot my computer and only have one Mozilla firefox window with just the google hangouts tab open and see if the audio improves.

So I'm all for having a virtual meeting with google hangouts. Maybe we need to allow 10 minutes at the beginning for people to join, test their microphones, work out how to mute their mic and turn their camera on/off, monitor their system performance, give the dog a bone to chew so its not barking in the background, etc.

cheers,

Ian.