How would this PC do with SL?

I'm planning on buying a new computer within about 6 weeks, and this is the one I'm currently looking at. How would this work with SL, does anyone know? I'm not very technical, so please make it simple for me. Also, please let me know which graphics care would work best, I have a choice of 2 right now. Thanks for any help you can give me.


Dell Inspiron 530
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E4500 (2MB L2 Cache,2.20GHz,800 FSB)
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition - English
No Monitor
3GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 4 DIMMs edit
320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16x DVD+/-RW Drive
128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8300GS
OR 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Dell 19 in 1 Media Card Reader
56K PCI Data Fax Modem

Theres a hardware requirement site somewhere here that tells you that this pc is too good.

Most importantly check graphic card support, especially on windlight client versions.

It also wont work without a monitor.

It would work though I would opt for the nVidia graphics card (256 RAM if you get it........512 would be better). The geforce 8600GT works beautifully. You don't say the PC has PCI express....quite an improvement on data transfer speeds. You also don't say if you have a network interface card which would be required since SL will not run satisfactary on phone/fax modem.

Horrible vid card, dont touch the 83xx-8500 series , they are weak , pay bit more and get a 8600 min or 8800.

I do have a monitor already, a good one that is relatively new, so I don't need a monitor with this system. I can upgrade the graphics card, and it looks like the 8600 is the way to go? Other than normal browsing, my computer is mainly used for SL, so that's a big consideration in buying a new one.
Also, we have a cable modem with a router to run 2 PC's in the house. I just chose the modem in case we ever need to resort to dial up for regular internet for some reason.

The 8600GTS is at a pretty good price point and it runs SL quite wonderfully.

Thanks, everyone. The consensus seems to be that the computer will run SL well, and I should have the 8600 vid card rather than the 8300. All sounds good to me. I am so pumped to get this computer, just wish I didn't have to wait until next month...grrrrrrr.

The 530 is sold with the SE198WFP in the UK. It uses Intel G33/G31 video driver.

I've got SL working on it, tolerably, but its been a process. I got all the info by searching other threads here & the Ubuntu forums - thanks to all those who contributed. Because Dell claims to be Linux-friendly & the machine is good value, there may be others out there trying to set it up, so it seemed worth doing a fairly basic description of what I did.

Ubuntu doesn't include a driver for the SE198WFP, so you won't get proper widescreen. If you are a techie you can fix that - see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ce/+bug/157321. If not, you might prefer to use Kubuntu, which includes the driver, which is what I did - Kubuntu is a good implementation.

I edited the secondlife file (the one you click to run it).
Right-click the secondlife launch file & open with Kate (or whatever editor you like), & change the '#export LL_GL_BLACKLIST=abcd....' line to 'export LL_GL_BLACKLIST=j', otherwise it won't run at all.

I inserted a line to supress SCIM (an input method which gives problems) as follows:
'export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim'

You also need to fix the audio drivers or you get stuttering sound. There's a couple of threads about this, but the best I could do was to supress the OSS & ALSA drivers by removing the # at the beginning of the '#export LL_BAD_OSS=x' & '#export LL_BAD_ALSA=x' lines.

I then fixed the remaining driver,ESD, by replacing "alibesd-als0" with "libesd0" - open Synaptic and then mark "libesd0" for installation. It will automatically select alibesd-als0 for uninstall. (I'm assuming you've loaded Synaptic - it seems to be the favorite package manager).
I then opened Konsole & typed 'sudo apt-get install esound'

If you then run full screen the graphics stink, but fine when running in a window. But if you launch in a window, you don't get any sound. So I launch full-screen, then use Edit Preferences to switch to a window.

Remaining problems:

Running Firefox at the same time as SL seems to crash SL eventually
SL grabs the sound card - no sound in other applications while SL is running
first time I click the 'connect' button it always says "Unable to connect..." but it works fine when I click it again.

& btw...
don't bother downloading the Dell Ubuntu - it doesn't have SE198WFP driver either.
I'm pretty cynical about Dell's Linux intentions.

If anybody has improvements on all this I'd be grateful.