Jerky performance? Vista? Nvidia?

Are you sure your graphics card is still okay? I've fried my older graphics card (7600GT) on a Vista 32 machine just a few weeks ago. I didn't notice any performance drop in regular office apllications. But in SL there was much stuttering for days and then crash after crash before the card finally broke and stopped working alltogether. I bought a new 8600GT and everything was fine again, until...

Just this week I got probs with my duo-processor. Again much stuttering in SL but now also in office apllications. It only seemed to work at half capacity which later appeared to be true. My processor cooler somehow got a bit loose from my motherboard and didn't cool the processor well enough. I had the cooler replaced, which could well have been connected to the graphics card problem as well.

If your internet connection is fine, then I really think your problem is hardware-related.

The video card is a very astute suggestion. There's no good way to test it that I know of, but I will certainly keep an eye on erratic behavior in other applications and keep an eye on fans, temperature, etc. An approaching hardware failure could certainly show up first in an application as highly taxing as SL. Very interesting and I appreciate the benefit of your own experience. Thanks.

4/08 purchased a Toshiba satellite x205-SLi5, Vista Home premium, 32-bit intell core 2 duo processor T8300 3GB PC-2530-0 DDR2 667MHZ SDRAM, 320GB hard drive, did-supermulti, 512 nvidia SLI dual Geforce 8600M GT Graphics. I also have an older Toshiba M45-s355. On the new laptop, my avie is all over the place, the camera is spinning around, when i touch the door to open my house it would take forever for the door to open. So I updated the drivers, went into preferences, edited the video/camera to zero. I have had very little improvement in performance. Also, I seem to lag more regardless of where I am. I monitor the lag meter. Oh I forgot to add, the talk button for voice is inactive. That LL is trying to figure out why. I know this may sound silly but it is like my new laptop is faster than sl. I have dl older viewer, current viewer, RC viewers Now on older Toshiba laptop, everythings works fine. I can do voice w/o a prob with either my plantronics or logictech mic/headset combo. I am using old viewer because my graphics is outdated. I don't lag no where as near as much as I do on new laptop. I don't play another games other than sl.

I welcome any suggestions you may have.

I forgot to add older laptop is running on XP. Again, thanks.