Crashing

For about a month or a bit longer there are certain places I can't go to cause I will crash every time. It doesn't happen but in a few places, the rest of sl I have no problems with.

Now today it's my own land. I can't seem to stay there for more then one or two minutes without crashing. I lower settings but still the same thing. Can it be my computer? Or is it sl itself?

I know of many people going thru' the same constant crashes. Anyone know anyway of stopping this?

Thanks

Well, not to be smart, but there are crashes, then there are crashes. It depends on what exact issue you are referring to as a crash. I've got a list of the following that I would, in one way or another, consider an "event" that may or may not be a crash in the literal sense:

1. Usually happens shortly after TP'ing somewhere, I click on either a popdown menu button, or on some item in inventory and suddenly, without warning, my client just disappears from the screen. Usually followed by a message on next login that the region is in the middle of the logout process (if done within a couple of minutes), but then logs back in fine when retried immediately. This has started happening to me with increasing frequency over about the last two weeks.

2. Similar to item 1, but usually has some "warning" per se. My hard drive will spin like mad and everything in SL stops moving. After about 2 minutes of this, the client exits. If I subsequently try to log back in, I'll get the message that I must wait until some particular time (a couple of minutes) before I can log in.

3. Everything is running along normally, and this is usually when I'm alone and creating something with the build tools. I try to take something into inventory, or rez something out, or move my avatar and find that I can do nothing but spin in place. I've dropped connection (with no visual indications, btw) with SL. All the work I've done since that mysterious disconnect is lost because it was happening only locally. Log out and log back in is usually no issue.

I'm sure there are more, but if the above 3 don't match your scenario, I would guess that maybe your computer, drivers, cache, something is causing your crashing problem.

What Rhom said. HOW are you crashing? Is it a BSOD? (Blue Screen Of Death?) Is it the "spin in place" crash? Is it the "everything just stops and I can't even see my mouse" crash? Since it seems to happen in particular sims, including your own, have you cleared your cache lately? Maybe there's a bad file there or something?

When I crash out of second life, and it happens at least once per hour sometimes much more. It's usually a crash to the desktop. Sometime it's a freeze and I have to hit the reset button to reboot and when this happens sometimes my video driver gets unistalled and I have to reinstall it. System:

evga 680i MB
8800GTX
4GB DDR2 Ram
core 2 duo e6600 @3.3Ghz
2xWD hdd's Raid0
24" wide screen monitor 1920x1200 res
Vista 64

I have a dual boot system, xp home and vista 64, on xp it crashes even more often. My system supports SLI (nvidia) but I see no advantage to running both video cards so I just use one.

Ah, the infamous "everything stops and I can't even see my mouse" crash. I get that about once a month or so. I just attribute that to running SL on a laptop not really made for gaming. Typically happens after I've been somewhere high lag for a long period of time and both of my laptop's cooling fans have been running at full blast for some time. I just figure it's something overheating.

One other thing to try, as available, is to use the Nicholaz viewer. I was doing that for a while until we were forced to the voice version very recently. I need to go back and see where Nic is at with his version of the viewer.

I am experiencing this same thing since a week or two. It came after an update and doesn't want to go away (system is new, running Vista 32 bit). Before this, SL worked fine. Now I can't do anything without freezing up after a few minutes and usually after doing something with scripted objects.

Unfortunately Support doens't want to help until they support Vista.

Nic's got one out that goes with the latest LL update Rhom. Running very smoothly.

Thanks, Sally. I've been running Nic's newest viewer for several days now. Much improved (as expected from Nic).

To Casper: I've been experiencing the #3 issue more often in the last couple of weeks, myself. Probably partially due to all the grid slowdown issues they've been reporting lately. I just make it a point now to make my av walk around periodically to make sure the connection is still alive.

That leads me to believe your video card/driver is short on memory, stealing too much memory from your core processor, and overloading the whole works.

Push down your video settings; draw distance, local lights, particles, etc. If that solves the problem, you need a hardwware upgrade.

hmmmm....Jadon has a great spec already!

Mine is very similar, Jadon, but 3Gb DDR2, 2x 8600GTS and possibly more signifcantly Vista Ultimate 32bit.

Leaving aside any issue that may or may not occur because your system is 64bit, and therefore out of my area of knowledge, I resolved my similar issues by a combination of a few things:

1) Upgrading from stock RAM to CORSAIR paired & sequencially numbered RAM modules
2) Latest Nvidia Vista drivers
3) Latest Bios
4) Upgrading PSU from 550Watts to 850Watts
5) Latest Nicholaz patch

SL running stably & high fps. Hope this provides a few pointers

Best of luck!