killing everything to maximize hangouts on air

Assuming you have a PC.

Ehh, I would recommend using Gamebooster from my PC gaming days, lol. It would exit out of unnecessary things so your PC could focus on gaming. Would improve my frame-rates quite a bit and reduce lag.

You can also do it manually by right clicking the taskbar and clicking task manager. Then click on "More Details" and make sure you're on the "Processes" tab. From there you can manually force close applications running in the background and "kill everything." You can sort the list by things that are using the most ram, cpu, or network bandwidth. Somethings shouldn't be closed!

A safer, but not as throughout way to kill open programs is to close all the running programs in the taskbar at the bottom right, near the clock. Right click and hit close on a few of them. Might have to click an arrow to show the hidden ones.

All changes here will be reset when you restart your PC, so you'll be safe.

Still fails? Might have to upgrade your internet speed. Remember, 1Megabyte/Sec = Megabit/8. If your ISP offers you 10Mbs, you will have a max download speed of about 1.25 MBs

MBs = Megabyte/sec
Mbs = Megabit/sec

You could do port forwarding/throttling on your router as well. Used to do that for utorrent and games but haven't done it in years so google would be more help than me on how to do it.

Basically you are giving one connection priority and/or blocking everything else.

I think that "limiting" your other software from using the internet isn't going to help you out much in this scenario, if at all.

There isn't anything 'special' you need to do here. Restart your computer, close of all software that loads on start up. Most software doesn't actively use your internet connection anyway (some do, but most don't).

What I am trying to say is, there is no "special fix" for a slow upline speed. If your upline speed is slow, no amount of "tweaking" is going to fix anything because the problem isn't with your software or PC, but your connection to the internet.

I am not sure how the internet speeds work in the US, but in Australia you can have the fastest internet, which is 100Mbps downlline but the upline is horrible, usually around 2Mbps max. However, if you get a prepaid data SIM card, you can see upline speeds of around 4-5+ Mbps. If it's the same in the US, you may want to invest into a prepaid 3G or 4G data only SIM and use a SIM card modem to do your stuff. It should provide a lot better upload speed if your home connection is bad.

Thanks for the tips guys. I know that my upload speed limits me really bad but I can't do anything about it unfortunately, there's no option to upgrade it so I'm just trying to make sure the computer isnt slowing anything down.

I can shut off the things I know run in the background like dropbox, skybox, avast, etc. but often there are things downloading or running that I'm not aware of and I'd like to shut them down temporarily without having to search and find everything.

I get so mad when I see other hangouts and they look crystal clear with near perfect frame rate.

check out your local city hall or county offices. Many times they have nice conference/video conference rooms free to the public to be reserved. Obviously this would be for more preplanned larger events. Note: many of them also have great A/V equipment for residents to use as well in their local public access TV studios.