Nivida Cards and Windows Vista

I know their has been issues with people running ATI Cards and Windows vista with secondlife in the past, but i have herd both ways that Vista and Secondlife will work running an nivida Graphics card. I am going to be getting a new laptop this week so i ask the general public: Will this Configuration run Secondlife as it stands currently?


OS: Windows Vista Home Premium
Chipset: Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 2.0GHZ/800MHZ FBS, 2MB L2 Cache
Videocard: Geforce 8600M GT (256MB)
RAM: 2GB DDR2 667 MHZ (2x 102

Hanze,

Yes it does seem that ATi have yet to catch up with suitable drivers (SL using open GL rather than Direct X) if the various postings i have seen on this forum are anything to go by.

Nvidia cards seem to be largely ok but ppl have been having problems - like me!

I am pleased to say that my problems have been resolved and a combination of Vista (home prem), Nvidia 7600Gt , intel duo E6750, and Sl are working great.

The confusing issue i had was out of the box my desk top machine kept throughing up Nvidia driver errors and sl would at best run for no more than 5 minutes. there were other errors ranging from a message stating that the desktop manager had stopped through to blue screen crashes. In short it all seemed to point to a Nvidia driver error.

Updating the driver and down loading some specific MSoft patches failed to make any difference. I then took out one of my two sticks of RAM - then everything worked brilliantly!!

Subsequently putting the offending ram back in the machine it continued to work fine and Has done so for about a week now - guess it just needed reseating!!!

Soooo bottom line is you will probally be ok but if you have problems it is not necessarly the graphics card/driver that is the problem!

Billy

Well the issue with a laptop is you cant just as easily open it up... Do you know a good place to find a 17" Laptop at those specs running XP? the only place i have found so far is gateway but they offer an older-slower 256 card, for the same money as dell.

Anyone else? I do not want to have to open up a computer and remove some ram just to play SL.... Can anyone say even with a 90% Assurity it would run or not run on that system?

I had mine custom built by HP on line. I have XP-pro, duo-core, Nvidia Gforce 7600 with a 17" screen. Cost a ton and yes when I had to have the fan replaced in it, it took the guy one full hour to take it apart, to just get inside of it.

Laptops are a real gamble.

It's not JUST the video card and OS either, in the olden days (4+ years ago) laptops seemed to /ususally/ have proper cooling. Mainly I guess because the chips ran hotter and they HAD to. My laptop has THREE fans. These days though a lot of laptops fail to run SL for no other reason than they simply overheat in 5-30 mintues of running the cpu and gpu maxxed out. Shrinking case size and the theoretically shringking power requirements have made laptop designers really skimp on cooling engineering it seems to me.

So... it's really hard to tell unless someone has a current model laptop that they have had good experience with by exact model number to give any more meaningful advice other than "nvidia gpu"

HP Does not offer a relitivly cheap 17" With XP. Dell and Gateway do, but im not happy with the gateway machines graphics options. Alienware doubbles the price for the same hardwear. Iv built a desktop befor but never a laptop...perhaps time to try?

I bought a Qosmio laptop with an nVidia geforce 6600, windows xp media ed. etc., and it is very true that the cooling issue can create problems running SL on a lappy can be a bit tricky. The Qosmio runs pretty cool, but I did have some quirky problems until I started using the chillpad under the laptop. I don't run any of my systems with Vista, so I can't offer up any info on that. I got a great deal on my hyped up gaming laptop from tigerdirect.com.

Good luck!