help improving fps

Hope someone can help me here. I recently got a new laptop. A sony vaio ar320e. The processor is an intel core2 @1.66Ghz, it has 2 gigs of ram, and an nvidia geforce go 7400 graphics card, and is running vista home edition. With this set up I am getting just horrible fps rates in secondlife. Rarely do i get above 10 fps, which is almost unbearable. I've tried setting the affinity to one processor to no effect, and have tried messing around with the sl client settings...basically dropping everything as low as it will go, as well as messing around with the nvidia card options. Nothing I do seems to raise me above this horrible fps rate. I've also looked at alot of the posts here in the forum, but again, nothing has seemed to work. One thing that does improve it is to run it full screen in the lowest resolution possible, but this way looks terrible!

So, is anyone out there able to give some relatively easy to understand guidance on what i might do to improve my fps?

10 fps is a good fps to me. And I would guess its about as good as to be expected in sl, but perhaps someone else would know more about that. If you use the statistics bar it might point you in the right direction of anything else you could do.

problem is that i'm lucky to have 10 fps. most of the time its more like 3-4, and more like 2 when i'm anywhere that is crowded. On my old computer, which was a 4 year old gateway laptop, i would consistently get around 20 fps. I guess I just assumed my updated hardware would give me better performance. such is the mystery of sl though!

Don't be too quick blaming SL. First off, make sure your draw distance is fairly low, less then 160, 128 is what I normally run around on. In your client settings, go to rendering and select Multi-thread. Make sure you have the very latest video drivers for your video card.

I believe Vista has a funky disk defrag system that runs all the time, try disabling that and any other useless services that you can. New laptops come brimming to the top with all sorts of useless crap like AOL and such, make sure that sort of thing isn't running in the background too. Turn off Aero Glass too if you can..

enabling Multi-thread in the rendering menu seems to have helped significantly. My fps rates jumped up into the 20s, and are now averaging around 18 or so. I also switched from aero to vista basic, which seems to have also slightly increased my fps. Thanks for the help!

on a side note, check for an updated bios, intel released some new code that the manufacturers may have updated in thier bios.

Where is this setting/menu? I don't see anything like that on my client.

I don't know if I am the only one with this feature in the Client menu 'Cheesy Bacon' ???? not some leftover from the April 1st escapade is it (no pun intended)?

I don't see a clicky for multi thread rendering...hmmm