flash stress

I moved across the country and sold every thing including my old PC, and now i'm left with this very old laptop, to be specific its a Toshiba Tecra 550CDT, pentium 266, with 64 megs of RAM, 4Meg s3Virge MX 3d, 3 Gig HD, running 98se. Back in the day I guess this thing was top of the line but now.....
I cant afford new or i wouldnt even inquire about this...Here goes...
The specs for flash player are way more than what i have, and with web sites using more and more flash these days, even with high speed cable pages are taking way too long. I know that when im on a site i can right click on flash and set the quality to low, and it makes the page smoother. The add is a little garbled, but im not focussed on that anyways.
Is there a way to make these flash images automatically set to low quality by default? or some kind of a plugin to do this by default??
I had to go dialup for a while with Telus, and they had a program that sped up the web pages by not uncompressing pictures(or somthing like that), so everything was blurry.
Pictures arnt a problem though, its just the flash.
Please help as i am getting stressed out just wondering if theres something i can do..
Please, Please, Please, let there be a fix for me and others with older pc's that just cant afford an immediate upgrade
ty.