I've been out of town since Friday, so I've been stuck playing SL on my laptop. The last time I used this laptop to play SL, it was before 1.8, and I don't remember experiencing these kinds of issues.
Here are my specs:
Dell Latitude D600
Intel Centrino 1.8 Ghz with Speed Step
512 MB of RAM
ATI Mobile Radeon 9000 32MB
Wireless Broadband Internet
Windows XP Professional SP2
All drivers current as of 12-17-05 from Dell's website
Here are my symptoms:
I'll be chugging along at 20+ FPS. Then, without warning, everything will suddenly drop to 0.9 FPS. Everything on the laptop is sluggish. If I wait it out - sometimes it'll return back up to 20 FPS again - only to drop down to 0.9 FPS in time. Most of the time, I just had to relog to get my high FPS back, and it wouldn't stay for long. It made SL pretty unplayable.
Searching my inventory, or searching in FIND will almost every time force the problem to happen immediately.
Here's my solution:
I hit F-2 to get into the BIOS on my laptop, and DISABLED Intel Speed Step, then restarted.
Whoa.
I'm not getting 20 FPS anymore. But nor is it dropping to 0.9 FPS at all anymore. I'm getting 12 FPS - consistently. Hitting Find or Searching my inventory gives a tiny drop in FPS, but nothing substantial.
Just to confirm, I went in and turned Speed Step back on & rebooted. Just as I suspected - the problem returned when I re-enabled it.
Hoping this is of use to someone out there having trouble!
