Crash Crash Crash....

Help! I just upgraded to a new PC, and as pretty as SL looks now - it's beginning to bug me.

My old PC pretty much never crashed unless I allowed the 3d card to overheat. Simply solved by some added cooling. But when it did crash, it'd freeze the entire system.

GeForce 6200 128M AGP, 1G RAM, 3G single core Intel CPU

Now my new computer.... SL crashes completely at random. But it's always when I click something. Though never repeatable. One moment, 'Local Chat' crashes it.. the next, 'Inventory'...

GeForce 9800GT 512M PCI-E, 4G RAM (3.x seen by XP) and a 3.16G dual core Intel CPU

Is there something I need to know that's causing all these crashes suddenly? and what can I do to fix it?

Thanks!

What was the old and the new system? Easiest way to describe this is to copy and paste the top frame of "Help > About Second Life."



If that's true that you have 4 gigabytes of ram and only 3.x are seen by XP, something's wrong: Either you have damaged hardware, or someone lied to you when they told you 4000 MB equals 4 GB. If you've only got 4000MB of RAM, some unscrupulous vendors will lie to you and call it 4GB, even though that's really 3.906 GB.

no, it's a known fact. Windows XP (32 bit) can only see up to 4G of RAM, and video card RAM is included in that, so I have 4G RAM, minus 512 for my video card, and minus a bit more for other things.

Also, for some reason - I've noticed that I can't install Flash Player... don't know if that's related or not, and gesture sounds are rather quiet in SL compared to before (and all volume settings are at max)

Here's my full details if that helps... because these crashes seem to be getting worse...

Second Life 1.21.6 (99587) Oct 14 2008 17:42:25 (Second Life Release)
Release Notes

You are at 187185.2, 257941.5, 23.9 in Crossroads - Ravenshoard located at sim7898.agni.lindenlab.com (8.10.148.137:13002)
Second Life Server 1.24.9.98659
Release Notes

CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (3166 MHz)
Memory: 3327 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 9800 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.20008 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 100/82113 (0.1%)

Not that widely known, apparently. I worked at Intel doing network drivers for servers for them, and I wasn't aware XP had problems with high-memory machines. I can't say I'm terribly surprised, however. Though I am surprised that video RAM counts against it.



I have to wonder if there's not something larger wrong with the machine, like some software that didn't install or uninstall properly or conflicts with some of your other software; or a recent upgrade (especially in the driver department) that might have had an impact.

If you've got the extra disk space (or at least a recent backup of what you don't want to lose and a destructive streak) and time for it, I'd be interested to find out if it's possible to recreate the problem on either a) a clean Windows install with just the latest Windows updates, Second Life and known-good drivers installed, or b) Linux. Whichever you're more comfortable trying should work. If Option A works, then we know it's something about your original Windows install that is causing a problem and you can work from there. I'm using Option B on essentially the same machine (using the same drivers you would for video) and you shouldn't have any problems (or if you do, getting a bigmem kernel should fix it...stupid 32 bit memory addressing on the x86 platform).

There may be a corrupt file somewhere.

Try uninstalling SL, then delete the remaining Second Life files.

They'll be hiding in C:\documents and settings\[your username]\Application Data\Second Life\

Back these folders up somewhere, because this is where any of your chat logs are stored.

That will give you a completely clean install. See if that runs any better.

You don't have anything overclocked, do you?

No, nothing overclocked and the computer is under two weeks old... I did all the software installation myself and didn't encounter any problems except I had to flash the bios to install the 9800GT's drivers, and haven't been able to install flash.

I've been trying to watch what causes me to crash, but it's almost completely random though it has 'that reason' for a while before switching to something else. Yesterday, the *main* issue was right click somebody -> IM... ~crash~

YES WELL KNOWN, since the freakin dawn of 32bit x86 hardware

AND it has nothing to do with just windows, 32 bit x86 unix and linux have the same issue

now please quit confusing the subject

heres a clue

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

let us all know when you get up to date on your 1987 intel platform theory

thanks

Charming as always.

One easy thing to try would be to install some alternate viewers and see if they will get you by for the time being.

One can try LL's Release Candidate, which you can find at the downloads page in the Test Viewers section, the url for the download page is http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php .

There's also the Cool Viewer and the Nicholaz viewers, the urls for these and other third party clients are at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers .

This approach, using a different viewer, attempts to avoid having to figure out what the problem is.

I can't recall if the 9800gt lets you use older drivers, but if it does, you might try one in the 175 series, I think 1.75.11 and 1.75.19 have been mentioned here.