crashing and shutting down whole pc

im haveing some bad crashing problems last few days shuts my whole pc down every time i toucj my invetory or tp somewhere my pc is 1 yr old i have a brand new geforce fx card and i am not running a frewall at this time so i dont understand what the problem is it was working fine then i got lag for a few days but seems i wasnt the only one then sl shut down the other night after it came back i cant seem to stay on sl more then 15 misn at a time please help this is getting very frustrating and im starting to regret having joined sl even though i liek it alot while its working ty for your time in reading this and responding

If the problem has started since you added the video card, it's likely the problem is either electrical or thermal.

What are the specifications of your computer? What model of video card, CPU, RAM and motherboard do you have?

Is your computer prebuilt by a large company like Dell or HP? If so, what manufacturer and model number is it?

Do you know what make and model of power supply you have? (Not just "300 Watt", but what I'm after is the amperage rating of the +12V rail. There should be a chart on the side of the power supply, with a list of the voltages and their corresponding amperages. I'm looking for the "Min", "Max" and "Peak" columns.

Did you install your new video card yourself? If so, did you install the auxillary power cable on its own cable, or running from a hard drive or fan as well?

welcome to my world

Certain events in Second Life shut my PC down too. One of them is accelerating on a jetski. No really.

It's not thermal, its not power. It's since 1.6 was introduced. The day before, everything was perfect. The day of 1.6, problems galore.

Apparently it's my firewall.

So your computer just powers off, or it reboots? Do you experience any other problems with SL? What video card and power supply do you have? I know, I know, it's not that. Indulge me.

It powers off. completely.

heh. Do I experience any other problems with SL? It would be easier to ask if a minute has ever gone by in SL without a problem occurring. But most aren't related to graphics, and I can categorically state this happened on the changeover from 1.5 to 1.6, during which nothing about my pc changed.

Video card is a nVidia 5950 Ultra (256mb). Power supply is ... um... some 500w thing. Couldn't tell you the brand or much else about it without looking, and I'm at work atm

Any rendering errors? Odd lines on textures, on your av?

If you can find out the make and model of PSU, I'd be interested to know, as well as the Min/Max/Peak amperage for the +12V rail as indicated on the PSU's sticker. Unfortunately, "500W" doesn't really tell you much. One company's 300W PSU is another company's 520W. It's all in how they calculate it.

When did you buy your GeForce 5950? Was it added into an existing computer, or did you buy the entire thing at once? What sort of store did you get it from?

No rendering problems. Never really had anything like that in SL at all.

The 5950 came as part of a pc I had custom built to specification from an extremely reputable store in the UK that came highly recommended. The PC has always performed amazingly well with everything bar Second Life. And even then, like I say, it was fine til the day they released 1.6.

i got sl after my graphics card everythingwas fine till the update

I agree with the other folks. My card was installed prior to joining SL and the problems did NOT begin until the 1.6 release. The computer simply shuts down. Not the way it shuts down when you sign off of XP where there is steady process as applications close, etc. What happens is that the screen goes balck and the PC turns off. Thats it. At that point, if youre still interested in being on sl, you need to reboot and start everything up all over again.

I appreciate all the qustions about cards and power supplies, however how is it that so many folks would have similar problems with hardware that is almost brand new? Also, why dont I have similar problems when Im on other sites that have heavy 3d rendering OR when doing work on hi res graphics? Its SL causing the problem.

Dear god don't let it be PC world..

The reason these sorts of problems have been such a common occurence lately is for two reasons: It's summer in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to hotter operating environments for many of our computers, and more people are buying faster video cards. Most of these problems can be eliminated with better cooling or a more robust PSU.

Further, by excluding the most common causes of spontaneous reboots and shutdowns --electrical, thermal, RAM-- the argument "it's SL's fault" becomes far more convincing and the chances of the Lindens actually doing something about it increase.

When it comes to problems typically caused by hardware, it helps to be able to say, "I've tried this, this, this and this, my temperatures are __, it happens no matter what the room temperature is, and my power supply is an Antec SL350S "350W", with 21A Max on the +12V rail." This eliminates the need to troubleshoot the most typical causes.

So what's your power supply?

The symptoms described here are consistent with under-power conditions as Catherine well points out and are rather inconsistent with software failures at the SL client level, OS level, or driver level (or firewall ). When the motherboard is not getting sufficient voltage and/or current it does tend to black out completely much like humans fainting when the brain gets too little oxygen. Some motherboards have active circuitry to cut the "lights" when the input power becomes too low, others just "faint".

I am sympathetic to your collective plight, but please understand that the upgrade to 1.6 could ask your graphics card to do slightly more stuff, thus drawing more current and pushing a system that was close to the edge over it. I think I'd be one of the least of the LL apologists, but in this instance, it can be true that 1.6 "broke" your puter and that it isn't anything that LL could fix (short of asking the display card to do less thus eliciting complaints of "now my FPS is too low".

I am running 33amps on the +12 and getting whole system freezes ONLY when i use SL...look at these specs...i am baffled:

Phantom FX by Hypersonic PC

Enermax 460W PEG465P-VE ATX 12V Switching Power Supply (33amps on the +12)
Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS (7.1)
2 x 74GB Western Digital Raptor 10000rpm Serial ATA-150 8MB Cache
MS Windows XP Home Edition CD & Manual SP2 Pre-Installed & Configured
AMD Athlon™ 64 FX-55 Processor w/ HyperTransport™ Tech.
Integrated Ethernet Controller
BenQ LightScribe 16X DVD±RW Dual Layer Drive
MSI RS480M2-IL XPRESS 200 PCI-Express Motherboard
PHANTOM Micro-ATX Case (Black with Silver Accents)
PHANTOM FX: AMD Athlon 64-Based Small Form Factor PC
4 x 512MB Mushkin Extreme XP-4400 DDR550 (2.5-4-4-
XFX GeForce 7800 GTX PCI-E 256MB (Overclocked 490MHz Core & 1.3GHz Memory)

Are you running any programs in the background? This happens to me when running SL and other programs like paint shop pro.

i am not running anything in the backround...i can play anything or do anthying brilliantly except run SL
i don't know wether to return a $4,000 pc or to not play second life
please...someone look at my specs and give me a clue...

SL been hanging and freezing when i do alot of things usually in browsers, so what i did was pretty much nothing ~.~ i just pushed everything more down on motherboard, and pushed the cables bit harder in, i havnt crashed in weeks now.

So i guess i had a loose wire somewhere (sounds like my shrink talking)

Your spec. indicate a really rocking system. As Thili suggests, pop the case and seat all the plugs and connections. Next thing would be to verify you have all the latest drivers and bios installed. Many custom builders just install the drivers that come with the components and they may be several versions behind. Next thing I'd check is your temperatures. Recently, someone with a similar system reported the builder didn't put the thermal compound on the CPU cooler properly and was reporting shutdowns similar to yours. New daub of paste and all was well with the world.

I had a mysterious shut down problem a couple of months ago, ran diagnostics and it showed my memory was bad, tried swapping it with known good memory and it did the same thing. I pulled the CPU and couldn't see anything wrong with it, swapped it with a slower CPU and everything worked fine. Bingo, I thought, bad CPU. Just for giggles I put the "bad" processor back in and tried it and it worked. In fact it has been working flawlwssly since.

Thanks for all the reply's. What is about SL only that crashes my system. Everything runs prefect...temp is perefect. Anything I do runs great....all games, programs...exept SL.
What makes SL so different that my system locks up...?

I only started sl yesterday, and i havent even been able to move from the spot i start in, because it does the whole 'not responding' thing so i cant play.

Hi there,

Like some of the users here, I too have noticed that SL crashes much more often since the update to version 1.6. The program would simply quit after 5 minutes of use but not crash the entire computer. The latest version crashes less often now, though.

I do remember that nothing was changed between the updating of the SL versions. No hardware added, no drivers updated.

I can not log on now! I was at a party and all of a suden I froze up and crashed and now I can't get back in! I got in for a sec. and crashed.
So to all I was talking to at the time it was a crash and not me being rude.

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling SL? Sometimes your cache can become corrupted, and this will prevent you from logging in successfully. Uninstalling SL fully will clear your cache.

I did last month but I think I do it again now...thanks Cat

I too have had a lot of SL crashes lately, I don't know for sure that it was coincident with 1.6.

SL will just vanish from the screen, the computer doesn't reboot. Sometimes SL will lock up, then vanish; other times it just goes pfft! and is gone.

I am hoping they will jiggle a loose wire in the code for 1.7 and make it work again.

I'm not sure this particular thread is best place for posting this since the computer is not rebooting.

I don't know what to think it has now happened to me like 3 times in the last 2 months, and the last time I lost all kinds of work in PS, so I was very unhappy!
I hope it wont a happen again now I'm saving my stuff ever min.