A beautiful iMac!

I am not a computer expert at all but I love SL and I love my iMac. I have major probs in SL in that strange graphic shapes appear and eventually the colored carousel appears and continually keeps turning until I am informed that the program/SL is not responding.
I then force quite and try to start again by reloading.

Now it has become so bad that upon logging in the colored carousel immediately starts and I cannot even begin on SL!!!

I have a Mac 10.6.2, 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2.5GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM. The graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT.

I am a simple girl who just wants to get on SL with my friends.

Please - can anybody help me?

EmJay Raleigh

But I thought everything "just works" with Mac. You mean ad slogans don't tell the whole truth? Shocker.

Anyway, my guess is your problem has to do with that GeForce 7300. It's five years and three generations out of date, and it was only a low end graphics card to begin with. You may have simply reached the end of its usable lifespan for graphics intensive programs like SL. These programs are now significantly more taxing on systems than they were five years ago when your video card was current.

Ordinarily, I'd suggest updating drivers. However, the nVidia website does not currently show any listing for GeForce 7 drivers for Mac. From what I could find, it looks like they haven't released anything new for your card for Mac since 2007. I'm not an expert on how this all works with Mac, though, so perhaps I'm missing something. But my gut tells you may be out of luck here.

Hopefully, someone else will have a better answer.

Troubleshooting steps I'd take with your Mac:

Clear your cache. Start SL, but do not login. Under the Edit menu in SL, go to preferences, then click the Network tab. Press the clear cache button, then restart Second Life and see if it works.

If it does not work, quit SL, and in the Finder, go to your home folder (Macintosh HD, Users, the folder with your short name on it). Open the folder named "Application Support". In there you will find a folder named "SecondLife". Move it to your desktop and try running SL again. If you have saved chat logs, they're in that folder, so save it. If you don't, then delete it.

If it still does not work, start your Mac from the OS X 10.6 DVD, and run Disk Utility. Repair Permissions and the hard drive, then reboot and try running SL again.

If it still does not work, delete the Second Life application, download it again and reinstall it.

If that does not work, restart your Mac in Safe Mode by rebooting and holding the Shift key down. It will take a lot longer to start, so be patient. Once you've logged in in Safe Mode, just restart normally and try to run Second Life.

If it still does not work, check for a hardware problem. Go to www.apple.com/support and click the link on the right side of the screen to Download TechTool Deluxe. Burn the CD or DVD, boot from it and run the hardware diagnostics and run them all.

Your Mac is fully capable of running Second Life, just not with all the eye candy. It sounds like there's a corrupt file somewhere, probably in Second Life's cache.

I don't know. From the discription of your problem and it progressively getting worse as time goes by until you now cannot get SL to launch sounds like something serious has happened to some hardware device..........probably the grapics card. I'm a Windows user (well some of my time is using Linux)) but CPU's, GPU's and other devices get hot in Macs too. It sounds to me like your video card has gotten too hot too many times and is now almost beyond repair.

I would try reinstalling the most recent driver available for your machine........if that does now work then it's looking grim for your card I'm afraid.