Forcing particle textures to load?

I have a Powerbook G4 (1.33 GHz, 1G Ram, ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 video with 64M video RAM). Textures frequently take a long time to load up, leaving objects gray until they do. While I'm sure network bandwidth has an impact, my video card is probably a limiting factor. Be that as it may, I'm usually able to get a texture to load by hovering the mouse pointer over the gray object. I am not having any luck using the same trick to force particle textures to load. Partciles frequently render as gray squares for ages.

Are there any ways I can get my client to load up the particle textures? I'm rather tired of seeing gray squares instead of nice snowflakes.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Midori,
I haven't found a way.
In a really quiet sim, I can zoom in tight to the source of the particles and wait...that seems to at least allow them to appear...
Other tricks:
I turn OFF particles in clubs...they just slow down the graphics too much without adding much.
And try running at a lower resolution. If i want speed and not beauty, I'll change from 'window mode' at 1280x1024 to 'full screen' at 800x640. This halves the amount of graphics data and seems to help speed things up.

Thanks for your reply. I was afraid there might not be a trick to get the particles to load

-MM

Have you tried tweaking the bandwidth slider in network prefs? I find 800 to be just about right but yours is probably different. At 500 (default), textures take a while to load, for me anyway. YMMV. As you say, a 64MB video card might be pushing it.

Just put out a prim somewhere with the texture on it - you can even make this prim 90% transparent.

As soon as the prim's texture loads, the particles will appear.

If you don't have the texture, ask the creator of the particle generator if he can provide you with a prim with the texture on it, for rezzing purposes.

Yes, the "BandWidth" setting must be right, or you not only will load particles slowly, you'll load all textures slowly. I have 1.5meg DSL. I set Bandwidth at 120.

Thank you for the further replies. I did think of the "put the texture on a prim" idea, but I don't own all of the textures and can't always manage to track down the creators

I see that my bandwidth is set to 500; I'll try bumping it up to 800 and see if that helps. I've got a 3-5 MBps cable modem connection, so I should have room in the network pipe to try it.