(Sorry, got Trump on the brain, I meant to say "oranges")

Cord-cutting is good, though right now it looks like old-guard media establishment is readying itself for a last stand to protect the tired bundled business model. Dinosaurs like HBO still think of themselves as cable channels, protecting their cable company partners, even as they try to go online with subscription bundles. They never will get it: The thing a cord-cutter hates the most is bundling, whether it's cable company packages or even a single network insisting you subscribe to all its programming to get the one thing you want.

Give me a la carte video, or give me books. I'm ready to say fuck the corporate media.

But to get back to your original post...OK, Chrome and not Firefox, one theory down. Still, on the face of it, your description of your system does make it sound kind of underpowered. The only thing you can do without upgrading is strip everything down to its essentials. Ad-blocking helps, but there too the old dinosaurs are fighting back: Many sites now detect ad blockers and won't let you in unless you turn it off. I say eff them too, and go away. I never consented to this shitty economic regime in which I have to depend on third-parties to fund my news and entertainment, and I'd certainly opt-out if I ever have the chance. Next best thing is to be a refusenik whenever I can.

You can get some relief from autorun media in Chrome by going to Settings, Advanced Settings, Plugins, link "manage individual plugins", and finally locating Flash on the list and disabling it.

But a bigger problem with Chrome is that it's an outrageous memory hog, and that may be slowing you down. Check the Task Manager to see how much memory it's using and how much is left. Chrome divides itself into a myriad of parts, each of which consumes what seems like a reasonable amount of memory. But add 'em all up, and Chrome can easily nuke your computer. And note that it seems to bear no resemblance to your actual usage of Chrome--you may have just one tab open, but Task Manager will show dozens of instances of "chrome", sometimes adding up to a gigabyte sucked down a black hole.

Firefox is a little more parsimonious with memory, but it too will inexorably grow to the point where you have to restart it.

As an old programmer, I'm offended by the ubiquity of what are obviously memory leaks in browsers. Memory leaks are sheer sloppy coding. When a program consumes ever more memory, and never reduces consumption no matter how little of it you use, you have a memory leak on your hands. There seem to be some surprisingly inept programmers at Google and the Mozilla Foundation.