Various Fixes for Vista and SL Errors and Bugs

Today's subject is Vista and Fixes.

I have been looking around and seeing various problems related to Vista and Nvidia Drivers.
So i thought i would clear a few things up.

Nvidia have produced some Kickass Vid Cards over the past year. Namely the 8 Series Cards of which the 8600 up to the 8800 are the most sought after models on the Market for Die hard fans of Nvidia on the whole. However they have not been able to completely keep up with their drivers reliability.
This being Said, many people have been having problems with the most dreaded nvlddmkm error that stops their drivers from communicating with the various other parts of Vista causing what is know as a TDR error (time delay recovery). The effects vary from program to program but the result is usually the same screen flickers to black for a few seconds and if you are lucky the application of game will resume after the nvlddmkm error bubble pops up. In the case of SL due to it's inherent nature of instability to begin with, Vista will produce a C++ abnormal program termination and you will invariably have to close Sl and relaunch the viewer.

At this point in time their is no solid fix for this Driver bug and thousands of people worldwide are tearing their hair out over it. Nvidia has acknowledged it's existence but is either doing little about it publicly or tearing out their own follicles in the background while we wait for a permanent solution.

This is what more or less worked for me and chances are it will work for you too.
Firstly do make sure your Drivers are up to date, the Beta Drivers from Nvidia are not to be feared give them ago they will improve your situation some. But that's not all you have to do right now.

We should never have to take the following action to fix a driver bug such as this but drastic times call for drastic measures.

2. If you are overclocked at all, go back to your default factory settings. This is not helping your problem one bit. In fact what seems to be improving staying power and Stability is to underclock your card a bit. Myself I have the 8500GT card not the best card but under clocking the GPU by 100 and the Card memory by 50 definitely saw an improvement in Vista stability while playing some 3D intensive applications such as SL. Not the ideal solution but it seems to work.

3. To improve my System Stability even further with SL (which by far has the most issues due to it's relatively unregulated resident original content) I installed a Vista ready USB flashdrive of 4g in size and set it to go to work for using readyboost. Readyboost uses a Vista capable flash drive to expand system cache memory therefore freeing up your precious RAM to worry about other applications such as SL. This was the clincher for me. After I did this my system is running at about 97% stability.

4. Be sure that you have adequate cooling, 2 case fans (or more if you prefer) will be required to make this work. If your system gets too hot the nvlddmkm's will start flying like windows toasters. So make sure you have one fan drawing cool air into the case and another to expel any hot air out. This may sound like an obvious point to some, but it is definitely important nonetheless.

5. In the Nividia Control Panel make a new program specific profile for Second life. Make sure all the Anti Aliasing Settings are turned off (Vista, Anti aliasing and SL just do not mix)
Make sure your Threaded Optimisation setting is set to Auto, and Crank the Anisotropic filtering right up to 16 if you reckon your card is good enough (any 7 or 8 series card should be). Many of the features listed in the custom settings of your 3D management have a good explanation of what they do for a program. But as a rule of Thumb if you do not see the feature listed in the graphics section of SL's preferences then SL is not going to use it. So either use hardware settings or leave it off.
Once you click apply, the profile is saved and will be applied whenever you launch the SL viewer.

That's about it. With any luck Your System (albeit a little underpowered for the time being) should be a fair bit more Stable when running SL and the latest games.

***Just on a side Note some people have been getting a bug when launching SL that says that their Graphics Card Drivers are out of Date. This seems to be a fairly random Viewer Bug that can strike at any time. I got it this Morning and as working all day to come up with some kind of solution. I tried everything as well you the reader of this thread might have from Uninstalling drivers and/or SL rebooting to safe mode and reinstalling drivers, you have probably done it all too and then some.

What fixed this problem for me was to go into The Second Life folder in your Program files directory and rename the Second Life Viewer file (The one that Launches SL/The exe). Change the Name of the file from Second Life to Second Life.exe and viola problem solved. Make a new shortcut for your Desktop and drag it over and your done.

I do hope that this post has been enlightening for some. I don't really claim to be the expert at this but if Vista has done anything else for me (and I don't think it has) it has taught me to seek alternative solutions to what may not be an immediately obvious fix.

Good luck to you all, if you need it. Just drop a reply if you have any further questions and i will try to help you out if I can.

Rift.

Good list of suggestions, A couple of things I found:

I found that regular antialiasing was fine but that transparency AA was an increase in crashing of SL.

Also I found that threaded optimization set to atuo meant "On" on my machine and though SL gained a few frames because of it, stability went down. So I'd say turn transparency AA off, leave normal AA on and turn threaded optimization off.

At least that's the very most stable settiings for my 8800GTX. It virtually never crashes. (Also using Nicholaz viewers as much as possible these days)

Have the problem with the "Card Drivers being out of Date" changing the name of the file did not help at all sadly, and I have tryed just about everything else.. you dont happen to have any other good tips ? =)

Oh Damn that sucks I felt certain that fix was pretty much the be all and end all solution. Did you try renaming it and launching from the Main .exe first and not straight from the shortcut. that might work sometimes things like that make a big difference. (I know it totally blows). Thats how I did mine launched the main exe first after reinstalling and changing the name once I found out that it actually worked, then I made the shortcut for it.

Now I have this problem "drivers out of date". Last week I was able to log on to SL with no problems with this same computer and same drivers, now it seems the drivers have suddenly dropped of being out of date over weekend. Changing the name didn't help at all, nor trying to start it from the main .exe. I am stuck, especially since I just changed from iMac to PC and Vista, and I have no clue about Windows systems what so ever.

Hmmm, Mac to Vista eh? Geez thats gonna be a hell of a transition.
Ok well I can recomend this.

1. Uninstall SL.
2. Go and find the latest Drivers for you VideoCard (belay that order if you already have them)
3. Uninstall Your VideoCard Drivers (Usually causes a reboot) , so reboot your PC
4. When your System has restarted, Click on the Start Icon in the lower left of your Screen.
There you will see the search window looking all fairly familiar to the Mac OS.
Do a Search for regedit, you should only get one result. This is how you edit your registry in the windows OS.
5. Soo double click on regedit in the search window it will bring up the system registry.
6. Perform a "Find" Operation by Launching find from the Top Toolbar. Search for Second Life
7. Once you have done that delete all references to Second Life in the Registry. You may have to do a couple of searches to find them all and obviously if they are you Browser Bookmarks or your Installer of the latest SL version just leave them alone. (Vista is good at telling you if they are your Bookmarks or not, it will be obvious to you since the file path will look like it says wherever you saved the Installer to)
8.Once you have cleaned the Registry of all Second Life References, close up the Registry
and Reboot your PC again.
9. Reinstall your Graphics Drivers (This will cause another Reboot).
10. Once your PC has rebooted with your new drivers. Reinstall Second Life, and fire it up.
(if this doesn't work repeat the previous step and install SL to a different location e.g. Instead of C/rogram Files/Second life try C/: SecondLife or make a New folder and istall it into that)

I hope this works for you. It's a Bit of a Chore I know but have a go and let us know how you got on. If the Above fails to work (like it did with me countless times) then try the renaming the .exe file as I said before thats what finally did it for me. Cheers.

GoodLuck, Rift

Thank you for this well-written and informative post.

1. As you say, the importance of having up-to-date nvidia drivers can not be overstated. The latest Vista 32bit versions for the 8 series were released on 18/09/2007 and have made a big difference towards curing the ‘nvlddmkm’ problem on my system.

2. I have an ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard which allows for stable overclocking of all system components. Whilst the FSB is successfully overclocked by a tad under 40% and system RAM from 800Mhz to 900Mhz, I’ve found that any attempt to overclock the PCI-E bus from the BIOS, or GPU/graphics memory using nvidia’s 'nTune' application does indeed result in reduced graphics performance. I obtain best results when the graphics components are left at default settings. It hadn’t actually occurred to me to try underclocking, tbh ( nForce 680i SLI chipset with 2 x 8600GTS)

3. The ReadyBoost suggestion is a nice idea, and I might give it a try. However, it doesn’t escape the fact that when running SL on Vista the *minimum* RAM someone should be looking at is 2Gb, 3Gb being preferred. If using a 32bit operating system, then research is needed before wading in to purchase 4Gb or you could very well find that the operating system does not recognize all the RAM or can not use it all, even though the BIOS registers it’s existence.

4. Cooling is very important, as you say. It is eye-opening to see how much the system, CPU and GPU temperature will raise whilst running an application like SL, and most of us will play continuously for hours on end (assuming we don’t crash, that is!).

Related to this is the PSU unit. As we upgrade our PC’s, overclock them, add new components and all the rest it is important that the PSU keeps pace. Upgrading my PSU from 550Watt to 850Watt is one of the single most important factors I have found to having a stable SL. Of course, adding a PSU of that size also meant adding two additional extractor fans.

5. Haven’t felt the need so far to use nvidia profiles for SL, but have not found any significant graphics difference whether anti-aliasing is set on or off. Therefore I keep it off on that basis alone.

In short, for me, the key things for running a stable SL on Vista were
a) decent PC spec with 3Gb RAM
b) upgrading PSU to 850W
c) regularly checking for and installing any new nvidia driver releases
d) using the bleeding-edge Nicholaz viewers.

Unfortunately, as always with SL, “stable” means “having very few crashes *at this time on this client release*, with little lag and good fps” but who knows what the next upgrade will bring!

Thanks for the advice, both of you. And nice seeing you around Debbie, been a long while.

Simply uninstalling and reinstalling SL helped (this time). I don't know if it had anything to do with it, but I had been toying around with nVidia control panel a bit (playing other games, and they need different settings than SL to run smoothly). I turned everything back to the way they should be for SL though, but it was after that SL started to tell me I don't have good enough system.

Yes, turning from Mac to Vista has been a shock. *grins* Wouldn't have done it if there wouldn't have been the need of a new computer since my three year old iMac suddenly died. And since a Mac with even this magnitude would cost twice as much here... I just needed a computer, and fast. Though I am almost starting to regret it, everything does seem so much more complicated with Vista...

Oh, and I do have the latest drivers, I checked (well, I've had this computer for two weeks now). And 2 Gb RAM (compared to my old iMac that had 768 Mb, this is a vast improvement, what comes to playing SL ).

I think i know how to fix the nividia 7950 gtx (or gts, dunno) card for me
http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/8910/secondlifeanswerpz2.png
i clicked that and it worked for me.

Yeah that might just do the trick Hack it's hard to say. Cause well Vista is like an Angry child woken too soon and like all new kids everyone is different and each one has it's own solution. I did forget to mention that I did also upgrade my power supply at the time i did the readyboost upgrade but at that time only bought one additional fan to install. It looks like my problem is still directly related to cooling as I can play for hours most times and then BAM!!! I get a huge wave of "nvlddmkm's" until I let my PC rest for at least an hour.
Mind you I have absolutely no problems with any other game yet to date so it really looks like SL is the main culprit here.
As far as the perma fix for the TDR error is concerned Microsoft are looking at releasing Service pack one for Vista some time early next year and they claim they have it under control (but really at this point I sincerely doubt that they have it all sewn up, i mean they did release OSX err I mean Vista almost 2 years before it was even remotely ready so what lies are next)
To cut a long story short MS released Vista because Mac was going to get the jump on them with the OSX operating system and they had to appear to be able to compete with Mac at least to their share holders.
For all of you still tearing your hair out (I know I am on the odd occasion (I just had to fork out $110 for a new Wacom graphics Tablet since my rather ageing generic Tablet just kept fighting it out with vistas driver's) Vista is still learning to walk and many of the large companies (MS Included) are just sticking their hands in their pockets looking up to the sky and whistling an almost inaudible tune as they wander around and tell you that everything is fine (just shut up and no one gets hurt, We have your money you should be satisfied with that. Oh and don't try to speak up because we have your cat)
Hopefully sometime soon someone will indeed step up to the Plate and Sue the Ass out of Microsoft and all it's Major constituents for releasing an inferior product that does not do what it claims. I do believe that what MS have done is called Fraud and is a both a Felony and a jailable offence. They should be held accountable for what they have done and not be able to hide behind a Team of substantially paid lawyers who will prove just about anything in court if the price is right. In short give Vista time and soon it will be ready to step up and take it's place int he world as Xp's rightful successor (just don't hold your breath).

Hoo well didn't that turn into a bit of a rant? ... Anyway as usual just my 2 cents.

Cheers guys n gals

Rift