512 is pretty small for real time aps. I used to get by with that much but that was 4 or 5 years ago. It's just for fast buffering. You should see how much of it you are using with "free" or "top" or some graphical command.
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Here's what "free" shows me on my rig:

Axeman@2[~]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1811976 1259076 552900 0 236484 537900
-/+ buffers/cache: 484692 1327284
Swap: 1004020 0 1004020

The posting software destroys the format of the listing.
I have two gigs of which some is allocated to the graphics card. One gig of swap on the disk that is not being used. 537.9 M used by cache that coud be freed up if needed. 484+ M used as buffer.

I like to have at least one gig.
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I would advise more RAM. 512mb should be enough, but may not give you desired performance.

If you want sheer speed and performance try Xubuntu. You can install the desktop package through synaptic package manager from System -> Administration menu. It's very simple and you easily find a tutorial on the "google machine."

I installed Xubuntu on my wife's laptop (1gb ram, 1.74 ghz pentium M) and the performance increase was incredible. Also, she has an ATI 128 mb video card; which Ubuntu has some issues with. The Xubuntu is a lot less taxing on the device and overall.

More on the video issues. Have you recently upgraded to a new version? I originally had 8.04, upgraded to 8.10 with no video issues. When I upgraded to 9.04 I started having huge video issues, slow downs, audio sync. I searched everywhere for resolution. I uninstalled codecs and video players (vlc, movie player, totem) and reinstalled to no effect.

I decided to back everything up and do a fresh install. Now my system is running flawlessly. The performance increase and faster boot time is astonishing!

My hypothesis; I think when I first got Ubuntu I was playing around a lot and doing things I didn't always understand (audio codecs, running scripts, etc.). I think this botched things up and after a few upgrades my system wasn't running optimally.
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Are you on wireless?
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Yes, I am.
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I will definitely give Xubuntu a shot, thanks for that advice. I have recently upgraded to 9.04 from 8.10 and it does seem to correspond to the YouTube quirks. I also have the dreaded ATI 128 MB video card headaches.

When I really need to get stuff done, I run Puppy Linux off of a flash drive. It can accomplish about 80% of what I need a computer to do on a regular basis.
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Have you tried streaming while you are hard wired instead of wireless?
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Maybe go with Xubuntu 8.10. You won't have as many ATI issues. I would wait until they resolve them to upgrade to 9.04.

The only thing I want to try is to install Xubuntu 9.04 on my wife's laptop (with the ATI) and install ENVYNG to see if I can use the ATI driver, if there is one. That might help. Not sure!

Have you check out envyNG?

In the terminal:

sudo apt-get install envyng-qt

Hope that helps!
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Might give Xubuntu a try on my OLD desktop. Probably need to upgrade the RAM though, I believe it only has 256MB.
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You should be good with 256MB!

Minimum requirements for Xubuntu from official website:

"You need 192 MB RAM to run the Live CD or 128 MB RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only requires you to have 64 MB RAM at install time. To install Xubuntu, you need 1.5 GB of free space on your hard disk. Once installed, Xubuntu can run with starting from 192 (or even just 128) MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least 256 MB RAM."
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Agreed Xubuntu is very light. I prefer Gnome.

I have used Ubuntu on a system that had a 1Ghz processor and 128MB of RAM with no trouble at all. Slowness here and there, but what do you expect when running a modern operating system on a dinosaur PC?

You can always install the standard Ubuntu and then just install XFCE after the fact, if it is slow.
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I've always found PCLOS to be much faster than X/K/Ubuntu. You can choose KDE/XFCE/Gnome as the windows manager with PCLOS pretty easily. Mint and Mepis are also excellent distros to try. I'm running PCLOS 2009 on an IBM X20 PIII 650 with 386MB RAM no problems.
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PCLOS 2009 is really sweet. Ran it under virtual box for a while to play around with it. I might have to try to partition some space off and run it full blown for a while!
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Linux Distros are like cigars :-) So many good ones. Try them and choose the one that is the best fit for you.

Try this:
http://www.polishlinux.org/choose/quiz/

It will help you choose a distro :-)
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Finally upgraded the other night. Everything went smoothly, I need to read up on some of the changes.
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I'm on Mepis now. I migrated from SuSE. I like any debian linux better than the RPM based ones. Ubuntu based debians are a little harder to keep bleeding edge upgraded than raw debian. I've messed around with Solaris, SCO, IRIX, HPUX, and different *BSDs and I like what I've got now. But that said, I have to agree with the above comment by rennD.
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I am downloading ubuntu 9.04 now but would like to try a live cd or thumb drive before I take the plunge. How do I do that? I am not super geek but I am kind of geeky in some areas. Also I am on a "off brand" laptop (Medion) which is why I want to do the live cd thing first.
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If you are downloading the Desktop CD then it is a liveCD.
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Download the iso and if you have a usb or flashcard handy go get unetbootin and use that to try it out.
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This is a pretty good how-to on burning the live cd. If you want to install on a bootable flash drive there is a link a few inches down the page that will show you:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto
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