Help! Settings Change

Not sure if anyone will be able to help as the situation is a bit murky .. but I thought I'd try. Just the other day I installed the new release. Prior to that I woul occasianly have problems with lag etc since I use a laptop with Intel965 graphics, but I had managed through playing with numerous settings (not just the graphics) get things so they worked fairly well. Sadly I did not note down all the different places I changed settings.

With the install of the new versions (and the ominous 'We have changed your settings to those optimized for your hardware') .. things have gone to the dogs. Have reduced and started to play around but to no avail. There are certain places that before worked fine (like my house!) that now drop me into extreme lag.

Doe anyone have any idea of what all the values that a new install might change are or where I can find the list (and the corresponding locations for me to edit)?

Well, Intel965 graphics are not the best for use with SL (945 being rock bottom). My first recommendation would be a video card upgrade - not cheap with a laptop, I don't believe.

edit: wait, is that the G965? or the P965? Anyway ...

Aside from that, use the recommended settings SL gives you (they aren't going to get much lower than that if you've got anything like Elora's laptop, ugh), and do things like clear your old cache and make sure your system runs in tip-top condition.

Ghosty .. thanks for the response:

Video Card change is out of the question (company laptop). And as for using the recommended settings, as I said that is precisely the problem. I have actually adjusted down the settings from what SL recommends, but the problem is not in the graphics settings. I seem to remember at some point in the past having played with some settings on the advanced menu, and I have a feeling that the upgrade/install must have changed something there.

On further investigation .. if I turn off alpha rendering the freeze problems go away. This is not an optimal solution though. What settings can I modify to try and lessen this problem without removing the rendering of Alpha textures?

a weekend is a poor time to try to tinker with lag but you could try some of the options at this site....

The guy who wrote that guide needs to tidy up his computer leads... and a duster wouldn't go amiss....

dunno really never had to mess with my settings I just use a Ultra-Custom

I doubt this is going to be much help, but all the settings that are likely to be of interest are stored in the settings.xml file, so if one happens to have a backup of that from when things were good, it would give a lot of clues about what to change. (On Linux, that file is in ~/.secondlife/user_settings/ . XP, Vista, and Mac hide it in different places.)

On the Graphics tab, click Custom, then near the bottom, click Hardware Options and uncheck "Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects" -- that option always causes me problems. Also, on that same screen, uncheck "Anisotropic Filtering" if that is checked. If you graphics card can handle Antialiasing, then select a value there - even 2x can help. Also, make sure the Texture Memory size is set to the memory on your graphics card.

You might also want to try a Cool View older version -- I still sometimes thing the 1.20.17 version persforms better.

Thanks for the comments so far .. but nothing seems to work. It is definitely something to do with Alpha textures though ...