Adobe Flash and Ubuntu

[omegahalo-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org (Chris O'Connell)]

Greetings all,

After my father's 5th virus infestation on his laptop he has expressed an
interest in trying out Linux.  He has 4 primary expectations of his laptop
running Linux:
1.  Web browsing
2.  Listening to music
3.  Viewing MS Office documents
4.  Watching streaming videos

His hardware is certainly adequate enough (or at least, I would think it to
be).  He has a Dell Inspiron 1150 with 2GB of RAM and a 2.6GHZ celeron
processor.  The machine is rather old, but runs XP like a breeze.

After a very, very rocky start attempting to try to install Ubuntu 10.04
from a CD I was forced to download Ubuntu 9.10.  The install went OK, but
slowly.  After bringing the system up, running the updates and joining the
laptop to the wireless network the first thing I went to try was YouTube.
 The video is simply unwatchable due to extreme choppyness and lag.  After
googling for a while I was presented with a couple of solutions.
1.  Install SWIFTFOX
2.  Set the CPU to scale all the way up when a demand was placed.

Swiftfox did nothing for me (nor did Google Chrome).  I found the CPU does
not support scaling, which indicates to me that the CPU is always running at
full speed.

I just can't for the life of me figure out why this machine, which runs
without an issue for the first 3 tasks my father wants, can't watch a simple
flash video off from YouTube.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

I would hate my father to lose interest in one of my passions (Linux) over
something as silly as a Flash Video.

PS, I know flash sucks and I hate it too, but let's face it, the technology
is embedded in tons of sites so we are stuck with it for now.

Chris