SL skips and pauses with my new system.

I'm running windows XP in a P4 2.4c on an asus p4p800 mobo with 512MB of RAM (dual channel 256x2) My hard drive is 69gb with plenty of free space(10gb is plenty right? NTFS). I'm using an ATi 9800pro. ummm.... Everything is up to date as far as I can tell.

What usually happens is I get skips of action-pause-action-pause almost in a beat pattern. my fps are nominal for the area I'm in but I get the pauses about every second that last about a second. If it's not this then it's long periods of action followed by fairly long periods of pause. I can't seem to get the awsome results I wanted with my setup so I must be doing something wrong.

Edit: I think maybe I should defrag. lol

If you're using the very latest ATI Catalyst video driver version 4.3, it will probably help to use the 4.2 version instead. The 4.3 is known to cause problems with SL.

[Remember to uninstall the 4.3 and reboot before installing the 4.2 driver.]

4.3 WON'T cause problems in 1.3, however. Mostly because LL is picking up ATI's slack.

Also, make sure you optimize your XP by turning off the file indexer, messenger service, activate a firewall, and turning off system restore.

Actually, I am not seeing any problems with catalyst 4.3 on my Mobility Radeon 9000. In fact, 4.3 has lead to a LOT less texture corruption in SL.

Now, the only times my textures get corrupted are when there are a whole crazy load of textures in one place

I can confirm the same problem on my Radeon 9800 Pro running Catalyst 4.3. Re-installing the Feb-15th 4.2 driver release made the problem go away. (I didn't have to uninstall 4.3 first, either, FWIW).

Ah good... Defrag didn't help a bit! :/ I'll be trying 4.2.

Right. The problems were only reported for the high-end Radeons which have hardware support for DX9; 9500 or higher. I haven't used Cat 4.3 yet for my 9200, but I still get occasional texture corruption with 4.2 in both 1.2 and 1.3 preview (supposedly that will be fixed by ATI in a future driver release).

I'm about to install the 4.3 Omega driver for testing with the 1.3 preview, so I"m glad to hear that 4.3 works OK with the 9000. And I can confirm that the hesitation problem which I have in 1.2 doesn't appear in 1.3 preview; though I wonder if that's just because of the general faster frame rates in previews due to having fewer objects and avatars. The 1.2 preview was also fast and smooth, but 1.2 has been heavily lagged for me since release. I had to add more ram to make it usable (and I'm adding more again in anticipation of 1.3).

Uninstalling the old Cat driver before installing the new one is still ATI's recommended procedure. On earlier versions, it was absolutely necessary; but it may be true that the version 4 can be installed on top of the previous version. I know that the Omega drivers don't require uninstalling the older one (they do require uninstalling the control panel though). Personally, I've had enough problems with ATI driver installation over the years that I'll always take the safe route and uninstall everything first.