SL causes fatal freezes

Few weeks ago I started suffering from a severe series of crashes that would result in a black screen, unresponsive inputs and the PC would not recover from it except with a complete reboot.

Desperate to get this fixed, I disabled object occlusion from the debug menu which apparently only affected the owners of certain Intel graphics chips which I did not even have...but it seemed to do the trick and I didn't crash anymore.

About a week ago I updated to the 1.20.16 viewer (been using .15 till then) and about two days ago, my PC froze again...it happened only once a day except today when it happened about 4 or 5 times in a row, each time I could not stay logged in for longer than 5 minutes - same as the first time this started happening. The old fix no longer works and I have no idea what to do.

Any ideas at all?

I have a HP laptop with 1.6GHz Intel CPU, 1024 megs of RAM, Ati mobility radeon x700 with Windows XP Home Edition SP3.

I really don't think overheating is the issue since this all is far too inconsistent for that. To say nothing of the fact that on more than one occasion I have crashed *before* I have even logged in; My system has frozen while I was in the preferences window.

I have had similar problems. I have a HP notebook with 2.2mhz dual core intel processor and 2MB RAM running Vista Home Premium. A week ago SL froze up the computer, which on restart resulted in some disturbing system problems, graphics card issues which could not even be fixed by a system roll back. I tired of waiting for a recovery disk from HP, bought a MS Vista upgrade disk and reinstalled the whole shebang. Four hours later after reinstalling all the HP drivers, I restarted Vista and installed the 1.20.16 SL client. Five minutes later, the computer froze again and now I am experiencing the same behavior with the new system install. This is driving me crazy, HP tells me they don't think it is a hardware issue, the computer runs fine in safe mode, and I have been running SL for nine months with no problems until a week ago.

I forgot to mention that I have a NVIDIA GEforce 8600M GS graphics card.

Don't you mean GIGAhertz and GIGAbytes? With 2.2MHz and 2 megabytes I'd be surprised you'd be able to run an OS period

But yeah...there's nothing consistent about this, and our system setups are considerably different too. It's really hard to figure out what exactly is causing all this. I just downloaded the Omega drivers for ATI but I really don't think that'll do anything.

However...to be exact...when SL froze the PC before logging in, I was in the network settings every time. Yesterday, I only froze once after ten hours of uptime, and today, after I cranked the cache size and max bandwidth up, I froze again after a few minutes. I reverted them back to 500/500 and now I've been on for about 25 minutes...of course, considering nothing about this has made any sense so far, it could be just a coincidence.

I've been on SL for about two months and the first occurences of these freezes don't match up with any updates either, clientside or serverside, there's like a two day delay...

When I hear (read) about computer freeze ups or lock ups I understand that to mean you lost complete control of your computer. Nothing works.....no mouse or keyboard input. A black or static screen on your monitor. Possibly a complete computer shut down or restart without you having anything to do with that process. The only way to gain control again is a physical turning off the power to the computer. If this is what is happening then your problem is very likely something considerably more serious than a program crash like when you suddenly find yourself back at your desktop (possibly with some crash logger box popped up).

A driver could cause that, though it's not the most likely problem. A driver update is relatively easy and should be tried to rule out the possibility.......video driver is the most likely culprit if that is the issue, I would check for updates first. Assuming that does not fix it (because I really don't think it is the problem) you need to look at something related to hardware. I know one of you said Dell doubted that as the problem.......but think about that. It's in their best interest for it NOT to be hardware.

About the most common cause of system lock ups (freezes, crashes, etc) is heat build up inside your case (causing your hardware to get hotter than it's designed operatiing tempertures). Dust is very often the catylist for that problem. Since both you are using laptops dust is probably more of an issue that if the computers were desktops. Laptops are prone to heat related problems without the issue of dust.........and they are quite a bit harder to clean out that desktops. I won't recommend anyone not qualified to take anything apart on a laptop to gain access to the inside (partly because I'm not familar with laptops to even guess which screws will open the correct panels) but you can get a can of compressed air and blow through the ventalation holes. I would spend extra time concentrating on the areas of the power supply and fans. And then I'd go to my favorite computer or office supply store and get one of the laptop cooling pads to place under the computer while in use. I've seen them at Best Buy and Office Depot for under $20 USD.

If that fails to solve your problem then I would definitely start looking for hardware problems. CPU, graphics cards, memory modules, hard drives, and fans. Heat sinks not properly installed could be the problem too. And, with laptops, checking those things present quite a problem............laptops are simply not easy to gain access to the inside of the case to physically check and/or replace. A computer shop or manufacturer is probably your best bet. And unless it's warranty work, it's going to cost you real money. I would call my manufacturer and tell them everything you've done to fix the problem and insist they provide the necessary service to find the problem.........yeah, I mean bully them a little.

I'm afraid the biggest problem you are going to run into is that if you just assume it's only SL that is the problem and decide to just quite using SL or to "live with it" you are ingnoring something that is in the process of failing competely. Eventually, the problem will start showing up in more and more cases or situations. Problems like this just don't fix themselves or go away. They esculate until the complete failure occurs. If you do not have much or any valuable things on your computer then that is an option.......let it fail so the problem can be fixed. But that is danerous too.....many failures cause other faliures.

Just my thoughts. I wish I had a better outlook for you guys.

I really don't think overheating could be the issue if I can still stay logged in for hours if lucky.

However, I have had some connection problems while I have been on...the minimap frequently flashes red, and today I've been redmapped like three times.

I never said heating was the issue.......I said it is the most common problem causing the issues you discribed. But, I would try to do something to address the possibility. A three pack of compressed air costs about $8 at Office Depot. A cooling pad costs about $20. Compared to other expenses that are possible if it is heat related that's a bargain........plus just plain good preventative mainenance.

Hi all,

I too am having the same crashing problem.

If I don't move my av, I can usually stay connected pretty well but as soon as I move like dancing, or if I'm in an environment with lots of items moving like a dance club sl will crash within five minutes.

I have Dell Latitude D630 with 2 Duo CPU T7100 @1.80 GHz 789 MHz, 0.99 GB of RAM.

I'm running Windows XP.

Is there a setting I need to change on my laptop so I can stay connected successfully?

If anyone knows of a solution, please advise.

Thanks!

Squirl Jigsaw (sl name)

It's worse for me, I freeze even if I don't move at all, literally within a single minute of logging in...and a moment ago, I froze during the login process.

Are we still talking about a complete system lock up? Or SL crashing? If you can close the program by "quitting" or even using alt, cntrl, del to end process that is SL crashing. If the only way you can gain control of your computer is killing the power or your computer reboots or shuts off without your input then that is computer lock up or freeze. Two vastly different types of crashes. The lock up is very much more serious than SL (or any other program) crashing.

I think we might be mixing up what we are talking about.

I think from the descriptions it is an SL crash and not a computer freeze up..

No one as mentioned are you running wireless?, I see a network issue if you lower the bandwidth on SL (this tells me you can't handle max , and shouldn't want to any way, from all I have read on it )

DO make sure your laptop is clean in the vents (it surprises me how many don't think dust gets in them!!!) if you don't want canned air use a vacuum and suck out the vents and ports. you don't think its heat. well SL uses a ton of CPU and GPU and creates massive heat. so its safe to say running a cooling pad is a good idea, no matter what!

Now if you are wireless try plugging in wired and see if it last longer. my laptop will crash do to network connectivity a lot on wireless but is fine wired.

another thing what are all your graphic prefs set at? could it be that after the upgrade to 1.20 they have gone up to high for the cards to handle? the NVidia 8600 should run great (I don't know about the ATI mobility700 cards.) at a pretty high setting

have you tried an RC client or one of the open source ones? Like a nicholaz ?? to see if they run better? I find the RC always runs better for me ... besides the bugs in them.

It is a freeze up. My screen goes black and my laptop stops responding completely, it doesn't recover from it except by reboot.

And yeah, I've tried third party viewers. Results are the same.

I just can't figure out what's wrong. I tweak the settings, finally get it to work, think I've done it, and the next day it no longer does. In fact, I'm not even certain my settings have anything to do with it, they may just be lucky coincidences. It's really annoying when I can't even whether or not I am making any difference at all with my adjustments.

Like now, I decided to plug the laptop directly into the modem with a cable as opposed to WLAN as it has run so far...so far no problems, but experience tells me my problems are far from over.

You could check the Windows logs file to see if it has anything useful about what the problem was. Possibly the SL log file too.

Control Panel, Administrative tools, Event viewer, on Win XP, to see the Windows log.

If you are possessed of the desire to post a giant dump of log file, using a service like the one at http://cl1p.net/ would be good; people seem to dislike posts with log files in them.

That might be a little problematic...the log files are in Finnish :/