connection problem

This might be complicated, or it might not.

Problem: sometimes after playing for a few minutes I get stuck doing whatever I'm doing, whether it's flying, walking, standing, etc. I mean stuck, can't move at all.
Each time this happens, I end up just quitting. When I do, I then notice that my internet connection is dead. I have to turn off the modem and unplug my router and reset everything before I can connect to the internet again.

Now, here's what I have going against me already.
My graphics is just onboard graphics and it's only 96Mb. So, I get the message that it is not compatible but I am still able to play. Things just take a while to display properly.
Also, I do have DSL but it's the slowest dsl my isp provided as it was also the cheapest I could find.(why does the internet have to cost so much to use?) To give an example of my connection, my downloads seem to average about 32kbps. Probably sounds slow to most here but that is so much faster than the dialup I had.

Anyway... any ideas on the problem above? Is there any way the graphics conflict could cause a disruption in my internet connection? I am searching around for a cheap, maybe used, graphics card.
Or do you think something else, some other conflict could be causing this disruption in my connection?
Playing Second Life is the only thing that causes this, or at least that I've noticed so far.
I appreciate any thoughts you might have.

no thoughts? Did I post this in the wrong place?

While I'm here I do have another question, though the above question is most important...

I am looking into a newer card. It is really confusing to me how some cards will not work. Is this something that will ever change? That must really stink for people with decent cards that don't work with it.

Anyway... I am looking at cards now and one that I was looking at on ebay...
"3D FUZION NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 PCI 256MB"

and then on the list of cards that are NOT supported it says:
"Cards with the following branding: 3DFX, RIVA, TNT, SiS, S3, S3TC, Savage, Twister, Rage, Kyro, MILENNIA, MATROX "

Does this mean the card I was looking at above would not work? It doesn't say 3DFX together, but does have 3D and FX.
If this card will not work with SL, anyone have any ideas as to where I should look for a card that will work? I'm not really wanting to spend more than $50. I'm poor. Can't really afford anything at all, but I'm wanting to upgrade for other reasons besides SL. I think the onboard graphics are starting to give me a little trouble.

Anyway... if anyone can help with this question or more importantly the one I started with, I would greatly appreciate it.
I'd offer services on SL in return for assistance, if I only had any skills to offer.

The loss of connection and being able to "fix" it with a router/modem reset tends to point to one of those two devices. However, if you would try simply rebooting your computer next time it happens (don't reset your router and modem) and see if that "fixes" it too. The reason I mentioned is that I just had the same problem and was just about to go out and get a new router and modem when I just rebooted my computer one night and the problem was "fixed".........it turned out that I needed to delete my network and make a new network connection. Simple enough and didn't cost me a dime. You might try that if a reboot of your computer "solves" your problem. Otherwise, it's going to continue to look like one of the two (router or modem). If you can nail it down to one or the other you can simply get a new one. You probably own the router, but you ISP may own your modem.........have them come out and replace it if so.

Your connection speed is very slow.........and could cause you to lose connection to the servers frequently. But, it should not require the resetting of the router and modem each time it happens.

On the graphics card. I would stick with nVidia. Look at 6000 series and above and as much onboard VRAM as you can get. I don't know your computer specs but most modern computers have PCI slots for add on cards. Some still have AGP. And newer, higher end computers have PCI-e slots. You need to know what you have in your computer and shop for that type. With some googling you should be able to find a 6000 series card in your budget. Heck a trip to Best Buy might get you one too.

thanks, I'll have to give that a try.
I am doubting, and hoping that it's not, my modem or router. They're both under a year old and both run fine during anything else I do. It's only when I get stuck on SL that things don't work. But I'll try just restarting without resetting the modem and see what that does.

Someone else on craigslist was trying to tell me that I should just look at walmart and I should find a card for my needs for around $48, but I looked at the store and online and can't find anything. Same with bestbuy. Well, I haven't tried going to the store(it's 30 minutes from here) but online they don't have anything I can use for less than $80 something.
I know it's PCI, and not pci express or anything.
I'm guessing the card I mentioned above wouldn't be recommended?
I found a card on Nextag
"Evga E-GEFORCE 6200 256 MB DDR2 PCI Graphics Card (256-P1-N399-LX) "
starting at about $39.
Oh for crying out loud... on one page of the specs I saw this:
"Minimum of a 300 Watt power supply."
I just opened up my case and took a picture as I couldn't see the sticker well enough from that angle... then looked at the picture and I see the max power output for my power supply is 250Watts.

sigh... So many things to consider, so few options... it seems anyway.

I hate going out on a limb with this but I ran my graphics card on a 320 watt power supply when the minimum was listed as 400 watt. No problems except a little performance issues over all for my computer.....nothing that was noticable until I got a 650 watt PS. The "fudge" factor in power supply plus the over cautious factor of the card manufacturers should take care of 50 watts. Just don't sue me if I'm wrong in your case.

I say go for it.........and save your pennies for a bigger PS later. If you can save enough to get a 300 watt PS in six months I would say you are relatively safe. A PS of that wattage should run about 60 USD at Best Buy.....you can find a better deal online I'm sure.

Robot.........chime in anytime

i paid 69 for my 680 watt one online

and its got a HUGE (like 140mm) slow moving fan that makes it silent

but i doubt thats your issue (altho that is a perfect place to start a incremental system upgrade)

do you know how many routers i have replaced in the last 10 years?

6

they are crap!

go bum one off of someone and try it out before doing anything drastic

also look at your wires, are they twisted up? kinked? green crap on the ends?

look at where they plug into, are they bright n shiny? or dull and pukey?

could be a source of the issue too

Oh don't tell me that. That thing wasn't cheap either.
I'll take a look inside tomorrow before I boot up. But anytime I've looked in there, things usually look okay.

I'm going to keep looking around to see if I can find a card in my price range that will work with what I have. If I can't find something, I may just wait until later to upgrade things. We're really broke and things aren't getting any better anytime soon. I'll spare you the sob story, but even $60 is a lot these days for us. heh, my wife gives me dirty looks anytime I talk about spending ANYTHING on the computer... since computers are just so unimportant.

Thanks for all the thoughts. I'll keep looking around and in the meantime keep working on figuring out what's causing some of those little glitches.

What speed is your DSL service supposed to able to provide? I ask that because 32K is pretty low.

yeah, it is slow for dsl... I still appreciate it over the dialup I had where 3-5 kbps for a download were nice.
My dad seemed to think I should be getting better as well... he thought around 80 would be more like it. But I've talked with other people in this area that said around 30kpbs was not unusual. Doesn't help that I live outside of city limits, on a dirt road, so I'm sure I'm a good distance from the nearest hub.

Just checked and what I signed up for is 256k, although on my bill it says 256/128k

You are essentually on a dial-up at those speeds. 56k is the fastest dial up...........you are below that.

Go here:

http://www.speedtest.net/

and come back and tell us what your speeds are.

I'm wondering if maybe you have a problem outside of SL.

Not to say there's not also a problem with SL as well.

Are you on a wireless connection?

I'll go check the speed test thing.
Keep in mind I'm talking about downloads, as in when I download a file to install it shows as 32kb/s. Most dialup users with a 56k connections do not download files at 56k. When I had dialup, like I said, my downloads were probably around 5kb a second when things were going good.

hmmm... I just did the speed test.
download: 273kb/s
upload: 129kb/s
Wow, that's better than I expected. Now why can't my files download that fast? Or even half that fast...

No, it's a wired connection.

My speed tests are almost always near my advertised speed..........10 mbps. But when I download a file from the internet it is very often around 300 kbps. It depends on the site and how you are routed to get to that site.

But you are still quite slow for DSL. Have you called your ISP to see if there is a reason?

hey your preachin to the choir there bro, my wife digs her pc, but its still the most un-important thing, i spent some birthday money (good ol mom) on my power supply, and got "that look" when i tried to slip in a brand new computer for < 200$ hehe

if you have a pci system theres not much you could do, the bandwidth on pci is just worthless these days

the isp does come into question, maybe with those low speeds you also have a bandwidth cap ... use x amount of bits in y amount of time and your cut off for the day

hmm, maybe I'll call my isp, but I don't think it will do very much good. I'm using my phone company's service. They haven't been the most helpful people. Took a while to get my phone line in, as this was a new residence... then when they did, they connected me to something down the road and ran the wire across, ON TOP, of the dirt road until someone could come out and bury it... which ended up being quite some time later. I had to go down and fix the breaks that would occur in the middle of the wire from a neighbor running over it.

Then there's the dialup I had. When I signed up it was $19.95. At some point they lowered their price to $14.95 and never told anyone that was on the old service. So at that point, you couldn't sign up for $19.95 dialup but they were still charging me. I found out it had been lowered a long time before and they said it was my responsibility to know they did and ask for the different rate, and I could not be reimbursed.

And like I said, I'm outside of city limits so I don't expect it to be perfect out here. I've at least heard that being far from a hub can cause a drop in speed. Who knows.

I do know there's no daily limit to my use. it's unlimited and I can use it quite heavily all day with no problem.

That graphics card is garbage for playing games. You can find better ways to spend your money.

The required wattage is the company assuming that your computer has a couple of optical drives, a decent processor, and a couple of hard drives. In other words, a loaded down computer. Your power supply would probably be able to supply enough current to run everything.

At the same time, more than a few power supplies, especially the cheaper ones, aren't actually capable of supplying what they're rated at. So it's a bit of a gamble.

Not that the issue lies with the graphics card, anyways.

If this is the wire that your DSL is hooked to then that is certainly not helping. Also, I believe the accepted maximum distance from the telephone company's central office is 10,000 ft.....or about 2 miles. And 768 kbps is sort of standard for speed.

You can try using other versions of Second Life. May not help but it's easy to try.

I am having the same problem, except I dont need to reset my router afterwards, can just close SL and reopen it fine, I just got a new computer, it worked fine on old one in XP, but now it wont in vista

ASUS P5KPL Mother Board (on board networking)
Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad CPU
XFX GeForce 9800GT Video Card
4 gigs of RAM
1.5 MBs/256 KBs internet connection

any ideas?

Could you elaborate on that?
I mean, so far it is the only thing I can find that is in my price range, is PCI, and is supposed to work. I think I saw a few 5500 or something that could be in my price range, but I imagine those would be worse thatn the 6200
Seriously, considering that all I have now is 96mb of onboard graphics, you think I should forget about this card? At the moment, unless I find something else that is in my price range, it's either that card or stick with the nothing that I have now.

Oh yeah, this is the only other one I found in my price range:
nVidia Geforce FX5500 256MB DDR PCI
That's $26 which would be nice. The 6200 I found is about $39.


I only played a few minutes last night and didn't have any problems so I haven't had a chance to see if simply rebooting would work. I'll let you know if I find that out though.


Other versions? Would I have access to the same places I do now? Would it simply be features that would be lacking? You've got me curious.

One way or another, second life or not, I want a better graphics card. At the moment I'm leaning towards that 6200, because 256mb would be MUCH better than what I have. But unless you think it's going to blow up my computer, make NO change at all, or simply not work for SL or anything else, that's what I might be getting.

The 6200 will work though it will not be overly impressive. I'm pretty sure you'll get better performance than your intergrated video. The other versions of SL are versions that have varying features............the newest version 1.20 has the most, the second most recent is 1.19.1(4) (the one I use) which has a little less on the features but not a noticable difference in my opinion. That's the reason I'm still with that version. No matter which viewer you use you still play on the same grid, can do all the same stuff at the same places. The viewers just have different bells and whistles for eye candy.

If you go for that 6200 you will definitely have to get more recent drivers for it once you install it. First thing after installing the card go to here:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Hey, I tried out the version you're running. At first I thought I was going to go crazy.
My avatar was a female at first and I could NOT change the appearance for a few minutes. Once I did get the appearance thing to show, it was showing me as a male again. That totally freaked me out.
Any idea why that would happen?

After that it crashed about three or four times before I finally got to play a bit... and then, it was slow but otherwise okay.

The "female" avatar you experienced is what is kown in SL as "Ruth". The basic avatar every avatar in SL is based upon. There are any number reasons that occurs...........mostly it's a sign that a cache clearing is in order, or that you need to rebake. But, in your case, with your very slow connection speed I would say that was your problem..........it just took a few minutes for all the information to get to your computer and be properly sorted with your viewer. Going into appearance usually causes a rebake.........which is probably why everything finally got right for you.

Anyway..........glad you got to play for a while.

Having this same exact problem, I just moved into a new place along with my girl. We are both playing through a cable modem that is also a router provided by our ISP. We are tempted to take it back and see if this solves the problem.. we'll be playing fine and all of a sudden we cant access any websites but SL will run fine. Other times we cant log into SL properly. It says we're connected but cant do anything.. like we're stuck in a huge lag spike that never eases up. Also this will happen randomly when SL seems to be doing ok, one of us will suddenly get stuck in this situation.