Intermittent Freezing

Greetings fellow Second Lifers,
I am having an issue that I am hoping one of you talented people might be able to help me with. Firstly, I meet all the system requirements, and I assure you I've had zero issues with Second Life in the past. Well yesterday, seemingly out of the blue, I started having issues with small freeze ups.

Initially when I'm in the game, there's no freezes at all, everything starts up just fine. Then after a minute or two, my whole screen will freeze for about 20 seconds, which also makes it so I can't do anything on my desktop as well. I hear the hard drive start going nuts, and then it suddenly comes back to life. I am then able to move around for about 20 seconds before it does it again. Only this time it does it for a longer period of time. Until eventually it freezes for so long that it just crashes to the desktop.

This just seemingly came out of no where. The game, and I promise, had ran fine until yesterday. I've not installed anything new, nor have I changed any of my drivers. The only thing I can think of that might of happened, is the power went out in our house while I was logged on. I can't see why that would have an impact on this situation though. I thought at first it might be the video card having issues, and I tested it against running some of the higher end games, like Haze, with no issues at all.

So as I'm not finding any answers to this situation, I beg of you, to help. I assure you I did as much research as I could before bothering people for help. Thank you for any idea's.

Oh a quick list on what I've done to try to fix it:
Defragmented my hard drive
Cleared SL Cache
Uninstalled and Reinstalled SL

Few other things of note:
Seems like there is random blinking debris or glitches over the screen, and the sound seems to become distorted once this happens.

I Ditto It


I Have Same Issue

Both of you should post your computer hardware specs and your OS. It will help the people with the know-how to help you troubleshoot this as quickly as possible.

Good luck!

Very well, as I'm not sure as what telling you what hardware specs and OS will do. As there was zero issues before hand, but I suppose it can't hurt.

Pentium 4 2.66 MHZ
2 Gigs of Ram
TI4600 Nvidia
Windows XP SP 3

Like I said before there was zero issues with this setup before, so please don't tell me it's because I don't have an awesome system, or some other myth.

that Graphic card is a 4 series from 2002 I am surprised it ever ran SL!

random graphic glitches is probably the card over heating

Well I've got a great cooling system on that card. Plus I've tried running the game from a fresh startup. Which would not cause overheating in the first 30 seconds of turning the game on. Of course I played this game for about a week with no issues. I have ordered a new video card just in case though. I have a feeling that it won't resolve the issue though.

It probably wouldn't hurt to to a surface scan of the hard drive, and run a diagnostic on the memory.

the glitches sound like the card dying. or over heating... and yeah the noise from the HD .. best do a surface scan .

freeze ups a lot of the time are SL issues.. Draw distance as well or a lot of avatars tping in or you tping into a very crowded and texture loaded area.


What do you have the graphic settings at? draw distance? etc. ?

does that card have shaders? VBO? - try un ticked and ticked.

have you tried the Snowglobe client? or one of the third party viewers? this latest oficial release is a mess, if you ask me

Ok, what I have done thus far, with this card. I've ran the surface scan on the harddrive via scandisk. No problems there. I was also in a very clean zone, with very little around it. Again I reiterate, the game was working just fine with the standard client, and having no problems beforehand. But I did install and try out Snowglobe, the stability of it lasted a bit longer, but eventually went back to it's standard freeze and unfreeze situation.

Click VBO off, and then back on and both times still had the freezing. Graphic settings are all set to the lowest to keep that equation out of the picture. Draw distance also very low.

So at this point, i've already ordered a new video card, so I'll update you on how that one holds up. It's a much nicer card for sure. So thanks all for the idea's, and thoughts. I'm still willing to try anything else that people wanna suggest though. As my VC won't be here till Thursday.

Since the necessary SL update yesterday I have the same problems with freezing. SL freezes for about 20 secs and cant type or move and the harddisk makes some sounds.

This problem occured first when I installed one of the updates before, but everything was fine when I used one of the older SL versions. 3 or 4 SL versions back from the actual one worked perfect for me. But since yesterday I cant use the older versions due to the necessary update yesterday.

I use Windows 2000 with a Radeon 9800.

Any ideas how to use the older SL versions now or how to fix the freezing?

You can download older versions of the viewer here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Old_versions

Using the client parameter --channel

(described here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Client_parameters )

lets you connect with older versions that would ordinarily give you the required update message.

You can also use an alternate non-Linden viewer, although I suspect those based on the 1.23 code will have the same problems.

Alternate viewers: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers

Also, start saving up for Windows 7 and a new graphics adapter. Second Life no longer supports Windows 2000.

Thanks a lot for this answer Milla. Now my SL is much faster with the older viewer version.
I figured out to use this parameter. --channel "VersionChannelName"