I hate this

I dont have the kind of money to upgrade my system so could anyone give me the preferences to make SL run as fast as it can with my crappy hardware?

Well, really, first we'd have to know what your "crappy hardware" is. However, my advice to you is to go into the 'options' tab and turn particle effects all the way down. I keep particles at 64, because I can tell where they are, but it's not so laggy. Also, cut down your draw distance. The less you're trying to render, the faster it will come up. Fog also slags up my machine, and it makes it hard to see, so turning (of all things) *up* the number on fog will make it start farther from you.

Make sure that under ... I want to say 'network'... your bandwidth is set accurately. If it's set to more than you have, you'll get hiccups and slower rez times.

Hope that helps, at least a little.

I had run SL 1.3 and 1.4 with a PIII 450 with 256 Megs of ram and a GForce MX 200, ram basically the only thing I say is required to be up to as much possible, anything else, can scrape by at minimums, with the right settings:
this is done by tab, so here goes:

Network Tab:
Maximum Bandwidth is Megabits and should be about fifty to a hundred below your upstream bandwidth (donno what I'm talking about, ask the person who pays the cable/dsl bill what the upstream and downstream are, downstream becomes a factor over in Audio)

Display Tab:
Uncheck all performance options, checking Disable Far Clip may improve performance with newer graphics cards, that one you can play around with to find out.
Avitar Rendering (requires restart): none.
Terrain Detail: none
All others to your preference

Performance Options:
AGP if you got it.
Texture cache that matches your video card. (small helps)
Video card memory to match your card.
Object detail slider, max one notch above minimum, there are notches to it, they're not visible.
Tree Detail: minimum, can go up one notch too.
Avatar Detail: 1 notch above minimum at most.

turn off the Avatar Vertex Program if it's enabled.

Draw Distance: 64
Fog Distance Ratio: your preference, looks better at 4.0 unless you're used to smoggy/foggy areas. 3.0's said to be most 'Jersey like' by friends.
Drop Draw Distance does nothing for you, zero it.
Bump Draw Distance: zero
Max Particle Count: zero.
Outfit composit Limit: zero

Audio:
Disable stream URL if you get less than 1 meg downstream with your broadband provider

Play around a bit, use alt-1 to get the speed spec (note that client FPS and server FPS are totally unrelated, serverFPS is a process measure, while client FPS is a rate at which the image refreshes on your screen)

SL itself works as a streaming format so if you don't move around too much while playing with visual settings, you can actually figure out what works better and worse by comparing FPS, and moving more to see what works for bandwidth.

These settings are what I found 'made it usable' for SL on my old system, I've since upgraded to a 1GHz system, and keep mostly the same settings for sake of better time on SL. Performance boosters: Ram and Video card, both will make life a lot better, my MX200's straining still, with better settings otherwise.

Downstream, actually. Upstream is how fast you send. Downstream is how fast you receive, and that is what is controlled by that slider.

As I've observed, upstream seems choked by the setting. I didn't say it was technically right, these are observed settings.