Constant crash problems...

Had this in another topic, but wanted my own so I could have a clearer message... from day one I've always had my little crashes here or there as a lot of people had, maybe 3 or 4 a day, no biggy... as of the past four or so days though, I seem to be crashing anywhere from 5 seconds after login, to 10 minutes.. I've gone to heavy populated sims, empty sims, I've tried turning on and off the settings I've had on, I reinstalled, formatted the entire PC... currently I have an Athlon 64 3800+, Radeon 9800SE, 1 gig of ram, WinXP home SP 1 (SP2 causes more problems than it fixes...) Latest DirectX, latest OMEGA drivers for my Radeon, AGP settings set to 4x, no fastwrite.. I'm running out of things to try, so any advice would be very welcome.

I'm having crash problems like that too.. sometimes barely 2 seconds after I've logged in. I've lowered quality settings, made sure drivers were up to date etc etc etc. No luck so far. I've seen posts from many different ppl with similar problems, all with different computer specs/graphics cards etc. Hopefully someone will come along with an answer soon. Good luck to you! Looks like we all need some

And then some.. I've noticed a similarity in each of the posts too, in this case the crashing has flared up over the past four days.. makes me wonder if it's something on the Linden's side, doing something to the servers or some such, because I have a feeling 100 or so computers didn't suddenly start acting up at the same time, yknow?

Bumpidge

Update... I've tried the latest OMEGA, and stock ATI drivers, checked my ABIT AV8 compatibility with Radeon 9800 PRO, resocketed my ram, run memtest with 5 passes, disabled onboard sound (Which I use), tried near every combo of configs I can think of for SL, dusted the inside of my tower, checked the drivers for each part to ensure they're up to date, completely reformatted the computer with nothing but OMEGA, and hardware drivers, with SL, and I'm still crashing within 5 minutes of gameplay, more often than not, less than. Please, someone help out here, Linden or otherwise... I have a teir 2 account, and it kinda sucks to pay for something you can't play, that you could two weeks ago...

To tell the truth the only thing I can think of is check your power supply and make sure it is at least 12A on the +12v rail. ATI recommends a 300 watt power supply but there is no set formula to calculate watts on power supplies much like car stereos. A 100 watt Roadmaster isn't the same as a 100watt Bose. Also, the hotter the computer runs, the less power the power supply will actually produce. (power ratings on the side are specs at 25C, if your case is at the typical 40C then expect a 30% or so drop in specs) so if you are running in a hot room and you have a marginal power supply then you may run into trouble.

Turn off any firewall or anything Norton's and see if it affects the crash frequency. Go into your bios and turn off fast writes and if your bios has the feature nudge up the AGP voltage just a hair. Go into the driver control panel and make sure all the AA and AF filtering are set to "application controled" then in SL turn off "anistropic filtering" in preferences.

Sigh, I pulled my 9800pro out of my main computer and installed a 6600GT for the exact same reasons, I got tired of fighting it. I haven't had a bit of trouble with my rig since.

Another update.... after pulling off the side of my case, re-plugging in my AGP card, and setting a fan next to it, I've dropped my temp while playing SL from 55-60C, to 40-50C on my CPU, and my sys temp is down to 30... while I don't believe replugging it had anything to do with it overall; but I'm now online for 20 minutes and counting, keeping a constant eye on my temp, thus far, all seems well... just seems SL became a huge powerhog with the last patch (and prepatch) or some such.... I'm thinking of investing in a upgrade fan for my Radeon (From what I hear, the fan it comes with isn't near powerful enough..) I hope this helps atleast someone out there.