Crash! Anyone successful with Intel 965 chip set?

My new laptop crashes about every 20 minutes from SL; SL suddenly disappears, and all other programs continue to run fine. I am running Windows XP SP2, Intel 965 128mb video card (built into laptop) and using the latest version of Second Life main viewer and updated Windows XP and video driver updated.

Also, possibly related, possibly not, some fonts are very clear inside SL, but other fonts including the whole of the chat and IM windows, have very unclear, choppy text, for example, "i" and "l" look literally identical, and all letters are choppy, as if showing at a different resolution. My laptop screen resolution is 1240x800, and I set the Second Life screen aspect ratio at 8:5, but also tried the other Preferences options with the same fonts being displayed.

The laptop works fine for everything else (but I do not play any other "games". Any ideas?

It's possible that it's a trouble related to the viewer. Why don't you try other ones?
RC: http://secondlife.com/community/downloads-optional.php
First Look: http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php
Onrez: http://viewer.onrez.com/
Nicholaz: http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/
Dale's (old?): http://sl.daleglass.net/

Based on your (good) advice, I am trying the Release Candidate viewer. I don't know yet if it will crash or not, but the text is still the same - perfect in part of SL, but all chopped around the edges in IM and chat (and a few other places). At least the text part must have a simple solution - but I don't know what it is!

I also updated my DirectX 9 to the latest version 9.xxx.

I am using the Intel 945G and was crashing a lot once I got to the "real" world (off the starter islands). Sometimes the crashes had more to do with the SL server than anything else. But there were some tweaks I had to do to get stablized. The information I found on the Internet was a pick and choose, test and tear my hair out, kind of experience. Hit and miss a lot of the time. I did finally piece together a configuration that worked best for ME.

One of the main things was setting my maximum bandwidth in SL (prefs: network) to slightly below the maximum upload (not download) speed of my ISP. In my case, using DSL, I set mine to 250. Setting it above the max UPLOAD speed of your ISP doesn't do a darned thing... other than congest your connection.

For ME... in the Intel graphics driver 3D settings, this worked best:

Asyn flip: off
Flipping policy: flip
Force S3TC Texture Compression: Off
FXT1 text compress: off
Driver mem footprint: normal
Text Color Depth: Desktop color depth
Anisotropic Filtering: Application Control

My basic display settings, 32 bit, 1024x768.

In SL I set my graphics to 800x600, fullscreen: 4-3. Under graphics detail I set no shaders, avatar rendering to normal, enable nearby local lights, and SOMETIMES I set terrain detail to High but usually leave it set to low. If I hit a really laggy area when I have it on, I turn it off. It helps A LOT.

In advanced graphics I selected 64MB for my graphics memory rather than the 128MB that my card has available. This stopped the issue that I was having with blue screen errors with the explaination that my driver got stuck in a infinite loop. I haven't had that error since.

I don't enable voice chat unless I am going to be using it.

On text chat I do not have chat bubbles enabled. They tend to be annoying anyway.

When you are locking up, if you can still move your mouse, hit CTRL-ENTER and it will switch you from "run in a window" to fullscreen. Sometimes this stops the lockup. Sometimes. Don't quote me on that, though.

Really, it is a hunt for that Red October. It's hit and miss. Find the best configuration for YOU and go with it.

Thanks for the details. I was considering whether to set lower the memory usage and speed, to give a cushion in the performance area... now I will definitely do it.

I don't get blue screens - just magically vanishing Second Life player. Still, there is enough similarity.

One question: did you ever have the jaggy text problem in SL? This is seen in IMs and chat. It is always the same - little chunks of letters are messed up. That COULD be the selection of window resolution... I will experiment more with all this and will let you know the results. Thanks.

I DO have those jaggy texts. For me it is the bottom of the text, like the D will be missing, etc.. It makes it a little annoying when reading chat and notecards. It's always been that way for me. I never did get around the trying to figure it out.

*lazy me*