Cannot resolve slow & jerky movements

A System restore won't always defeat a virus. Check your permissions in your firewall. As you are running ZoneAlarm Firewall, have you turned off the Windows XP Firewall?

If not, before doing so, look in the Exceptions tab, and see what programmes are listed and checked. Basically, no programme needs to work through your firewall that behaves itself. LL recomend you check SecondLife.exe and SLVoice. Unless you are on a Intranet, you can safetly uncheck everything in that list.

XP is now up to SP3, this includes a lot of network improvements.

Routers can be refreshed both with your ISP and the DCHP tables by simply unplugging it from the mains for 20 seconds.

As you have a mobility GC, I assume you are using a laptop. Heat can be your greatest enemy. Check all airports and fans that are accessible, keeping them clear. SL is a graphics intense programme, which can stress your system. It also requires the downloading of a lot of graphic textures as you travel about in SL. Heat can also effect your Router. If you are using a wireless connection to your router, consider hardwiring as radio frequencies can cause greater latencies and packet loss.

Kierne,

ATI Catalyst Mobility 8.6 (18 June 200. You can maybe have a look at it. Don't know if it will help but you never know.

Tabitha,

I was using the 8.6 drivers but they didn't seem to help much. I downgraded my drivers to the last set of Omega drivers and that seemed to help a little bit. The problem, I've come to realize, has to do with my video card actually only having 128mb of onboard memory and using another 128mb of system memory as shared memory to give it the 256mb of memory it claimed to have. Even though it's a PCI-X card, that's still not a satisfactory setup. I turned the texture memory all the way down to 128mb and that seems to have mostly fixed the problem. I still get slowdowns from time to time and watching people dance in a club can be a glorified slideshow, but at least SL is playable now. I don't think there's anything really to be done besides getting a new video card, which means a new laptop or desktop. Alas.

Its a bit sucky the way alot of vendors advertise that 256 video. Huge print the 256 and tiny print the shared bit. arg !!! o well.

Anyways at least you've figured how to get the best you can, so thats good =)

/me makes note of how you dealt with texture memory on a shared card in case someone else asks.

Edit: Incase anyone else has the same problem, can you say what driver version you rolled back too ???

I ended up reinstalling the most recent driver but instead of from the Radeon website, from the Dell site. That's all.

I'm having a major problem with lag, it takes about a second between pressing the up key and my character moving. I've tried lowering the graphics but makes little difference, since i get an average of 60fps anyway and crysis seems to run fine. I've tried lowering the draw distance and limiting the bandwidth, which helps but doesn't fix it completely.
I've also turned off streaming.

I have a 256K internet connection, which i know is fairly slow, but i can run other MMORPG's just fine like World of Warcraft even with teamspeak running at the same time.
But when I play SL theres a 1 second delay, even when everythings downloaded! I've spent about an hour in the startup area, evrything is clearly downloaded for that area and i still get lag?

I don't see any reason for this LAG, even when there are textures to be loaded, there should be an option to only download low rez versions of the textures, which shouldn't be a problem since they seem to download progressively anyway.

I deperately want to play SL but with this lag, its just not practicle.

You cannot compare WOW with SL, they are 2 different platforms. SL is not only a OpenGL platform (Not DirectX), but also dynamic. Everytime you move about in SL, something quite unpredictable will come into view, or event, person, particles etc... Get close to a sim edge and you also get the 'child' objects/actions from those sims streaming at you. Your graphics system has to render these on the fly.
With WOW, much of what happens is predetermined. Buildings, events, light maps, even clothing etc is all cached on your system, requiring no, or little, download of data. With the exception of people controlling their position and action timing, little else is needed that cannot effectively run direct from your HD.

Your problem is your connection.