Sony Vaio FRV-26 Hardware

I have a stock Sony-FRV-26 laptop and during the 'connect' phase SL crashes. Is there any hope of fixing this before my trial runs out?!

Can you post some specs? Graphics card, memory, etc. What is the crash message, if any?

Sure

2.8 Ghz P4 Processor (533 mhz fsb)
384 megs (system) RAM
40 gig HD

Vid Card

ATI Radeon IGP 345m

GPU: 350mhz
RAM: 128 megs (Shared)

My video card has up-to-date drivers

Well, right off the bat, that card isn't supported. In fact, I've never even heard of it. I can't even find any sites that give specs on it on Google, just people complaining that games won't run with it in various forum posts.

Maybe someone else will reply with some way for you to get SL running with that card...but, honestly, I don't know if it's going to be possible.

Do you have access to another, better PC? (or Mac!)

I haven't had any problems with my video card, in fact it performs almost as well as top-class desktop cards. This computer is the best of almost 20 in my household, i have many more, but none can compete with this. The runner up has a 2.4 ghz processor, but a very generic video card.

Judging from the model number, it may be a tweaked/OEM version of the 340m IGP chipset, which is described as "value" on the ATI site - make of that what you will...

For shotgun debugging, go for the usual run of chipset drivers, audio drivers, etc - make sure you're fully up to date.

Aside from that... *shrugs*
Good luck with it, leastways.

If I were you, I'd take a closer look at this runner up. It might actually be the better choice for SL. BTW, what kind of video card does it have?

I'm not sure right now, I just built this computer a few months ago, I have an old video card (Geoforce 4 MX440 PCI) laying around but i had problems installing it. Right now I'm using the basic display on-board the motherboard. It's nothing great (Like 16-32 MB). I haven't installed the Geoforce out of pure laziness . In the future i will probably get a better video card for it because it has some good specs.

The Radeon IGP chipsets, unless noting a numerical value (I.E. the new IGP 9100 series) are based on a Radeon 7000 core which isn't supported by Second Life as it just doesn't have some of the capabilities we are utlitizing.

Colin

That 2nd fastest machine with the Mx440 card should be just enough to run SL. The GeForce 4 MX400 is a minimal card, but its also supported.

I tried using SL on my secondary comp (without the MX440) it didnt work. That kinda sucks that my video card is like that.. thanks for the research though Colin! maybe if i got a Pcmcia to pci adapter and pluged my mx440 and a monitor into that it would work.

I also have a sony vaio media computer. Just bought it. SL ran for three days and now says i need a chipset update. I have a ati radeon 9800 wonder card 128. I am wondering if this is the problem. I went to the site to update the chip and there are no updates. Also SL has a page to update which i did and it says that the chipset is updated and I don't need to. I am confused and SL is trying to help me but I still freeze during the connection. I am also confused why I could play for three days and now I cannot connect. Does anyone know if this video card is supported by SL.

2 brief comments:

* My wife's VAIO laptop (PCG-240GRT) runs SL just great, but it does have an NVIDIA chipset and not the ATI. Sympathies.

* Have seen personally "problems installing" Geforce 4 boards... made the mistake of not following the install instructions to the letter (after all, installing video cards is easy, right...? )

Try looking at the instructions again, especially the part where it indicates COMPLETELY uninstalling your previous video cards prior to reboot. Once I did that, install problems cleared up.

Hope you get it resolved...

=Sinclair

I used my mx440 for about a year before i scraooed the computer it was in, so now its in a scrap box in my room, probly under a foot of dust