A new kind of crash..

Well here I am again, completely unaware of what I should do this time. I guess Ill start with saying what stuff I have.. dual monitors, Windows XP professional..still have my Radeon 9000 pro 64 meg.
Ive tried all the catalyst 3.whatever driver releases, finding two differences between them. 1. Crazy acid trip SL.. (really REALLY screwy graphics) and 2. Nice graphics, but I only see them for a few minutes before my entire system freezes and I have to reboot.
Till today this was fine, I was dealing with the crazy graphics with the catalyst 3.8 driver. When I attempted to play earlier today, first it wouldnt even log me in.. kept getting this error saying SL tried but despite its efforts something bad happened.. then when I was able to log in my computer froze when I tried to change my appearance (facial tattoo). After I rebooted I tweaked some of the preferences (lighting was on and I turned it off) and tried again. This time, As soon as I entered the appearance tab altogether my computer froze, but then my monitors went black for a second and only the primary one which SL is shown in came back on, however the graphics were more messed up than Ive ever seen! It looked like a broken monitor or something, only fragments of the picture were shown in this puzzled up fashion. This has never happened before.
I rebooted, let scan disk run.. a couple of files were corrupted but nothing involving SL.. when Windows loaded, the task bar was on the secondary monitor to the right and all the icons were on the primary monitor to the left. Aside from that, the resolutions and the color depth settings were all messed up.

Also, about a week ago maybe I experienced a crash that caused newview.exe and about 2 gigs of other information on my computer to become corrupted.. in turn it got deleted by XP.

Ok well I think thats everything! Any suggestions?

Turn it all off.

Hehe.

First step in diagnosing a problem.

Switch back to 1 monitor.
In video preferences, set the resolution and color depth you want but turn off all extra features (any Anti Aliasing or other performance enhancers).
In second life turn off everything. Uncheck everything. Set details to the lowest, view distance to the lowest. Mute sound.

And see if that works. IF it does you get to start turning things back on, test SL, turn another thing back on, test second life. Rinse, repeat.

Its a sucky thing to have to go through, but its near impossible to diagnose a problem if there are multiple things changing everytime and what not.

Just a suggestion.

Well I cant switch back to 1 monitor cause its really my boyfriends computer and he lets me use it hehe. But I Did change the settings in SL down to nothing like you said and that seemed to help a little bit but I still crashed a couple minutes in. I changed my appearance as thats what seems to make it crash and it did just as I exited the appearance tab. Now Ill have to test by seeing if it crashes when I build, chat.. and so on.

I was really hoping I wasnt going to have to turn all the settings down again but I knew it was bound to happen with 1.1, as they were attempting to make it better.. and with every upgrade ATI just seems so much worse..

Fanks for the help


I wonder how many people out there really do have a Radeon.. like an actual number..?

Kat, I get exactly the same crash when I edit my av's appearance. It also happens when dragging clothing onto my av from my inventory.

There's nothing you can do. It's a bug that has not been fixed yet to my knowledge. The best advice I've heard (and it's terrible advice) is to throw away the ATI card because ATI drivers are so bad.

Well I'm not going to do that, myself. Just have to get used to crashing and rebooting fifty times an hour.

As a note to Linden Lab: I seriously think you should remove ATI from the list of compatible graphics cards. They are *NOT* compatible with SL!

TELL ME ABOUT IT! but at least we can play at all.. I guess..


And about the crashing.. I can seem to be okay if I double click on the clothes in my inventory to put them on my avatar.. so basically avoid the appearance tab altogether. But you know it really REALLY blows cause I design clothes and I cant upload anything now.. also, I want to 'remake' all my old clothes cause it says noone created them.. but I cant do that.. if I cant get into appearance mode.. O_o

crapola.. CRAPOLA I TELLS YOU

Perhaps I was being a little negative with my previous post. What can I say... all these crashes have left me a little disgruntled.

On the gruntled side of things, you might try different versions of the Catalyst and see which one causes the least number of crashes. I currently use Catalyst 3.7 with my 9700 and I do crash very often. Maybe you could try 3.8 or downgrade to another version.

Also search this forum for suggestions from LL about what settings to use in your ATI driver.

Nothing will eliminate the crashes, however, except a bug fix by ATI and a corresponding bug fix by LL. Neither is very likely, I suspect.

I dont suspect they will be fixed in the near future myself.. Im hoping to get a geforce when I have more money so then Ill be happy (I hope hehe)
I still love SL.. I just get so frustrated sometimes with it.

Hey, Kat -

A couple of things -

Second Life (especially with the combination of an ATI graphics card and an AMD CPU) can be VERY particular about:

a) system drivers and BIOS being up to date - yes, video drivers, but other drivers as well - in particular, the AGP drivers for motherboards (for Via, the "Hyperion" drivers, for example)

b) bad hardware - flaky memory, voltages off spec, overheated graphics cards. Second Life is quite a bit harder on your system than almost any other game out there right now. If you are having ANY other problems on your system (mysterious crashes, bluescreens, etc.) then it may be related to hardware issues.

The crashes when entering avatar appearance are something that we know about, but we've never been able to reproduce it on any hardware that we have in the office - it may be that it's specific to a particular combination of hardware and drivers that we don't have.

The best thing to do is to contact [email]support@lindenlab.com[/email] - someone will then get in touch with you and then we'll be able to figure out exactly what's causing your (and other people's) problems.

- Doug