Frame rate / sound quality is refreshing slowly, strategies to fix?

Hi!

Having fun setting up my BBB, very neat piece of hardware.
My desired end state is a “movie box” for Pandora, YouTube, preferably that I can control via network. I’ll work on that part later.
I now have Arch/LXDE running on it, and it is hooked to a large Vizio monitor / ac power / wireless keyboard and mouse.

However, the video and audio quality in Chromium (pepper-flash, on both YouTube and Pandora) is only refreshing at 1-8 Hz and moving windows around the desktop is about the same.
My roommate’s Pi can do this pretty well, so I think my 1GHz BBB should do it better!

Should I be using the 16gb c10 SD card as a buffer location? Or should I decrease the output resolution? What resources can/should I offload to the SD card to save MMC space?

Please let me know what logs / config files would be helpful, I’m too new at this to know.