Game crashes within a few minutes

Hi,
I just started using Second Life for the first time about an hour ago and I contiuosly have the game crash after a very short time into it. I've reinstalled the program as well as made sure my video drivers are up to date. Nothing seems to have worked yet. My computer is a Gateway 7422 Laptop with a 64 Bit Athlon 3400+, 1 gig of RAM, 80 gig HD, and a 64 Meg ATI 9650 Mobility Radeon graphics card. Is there any idea why I would have this problem?

Go ahead and try turning the graphics down to a minimum, you can do this in prefferences before you log on. Make sure to check in Graphics and Adv. Graphics. Also, check to make sure Dirrect X is up to date, I think that may have some effect?

I went ahead and turned all the graphics down to the minimum and I already know my directx is up to date because of other games I've installed. So far this seems to make it crash faster.

I had a similar problem on my desktop system, and the problem was the AMD chip heating up under the stress of SL. I got a huge heatsink & the problem was solved-- not sure what you could do for a mobile. But definitely grab "motherboard monitor" to check your heat levels.

Well, it doesn't seem that my processor is overheating. I've checked the temperatures and they've remained very stable throughout the entire time I am able to run SL. I know this computer can handle a lot before it decides to crash any game since I can play Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and Battlefield 2 all very easily on the high graphics settings with no problems. I'm just a little confused why SL would be giving me problems while they wouldn't.

Define "stable". How hot are we talking here?

Which video drivers are you using? Are you using the Omega drivers? If not, do they fix the problem?

Also, the reason SL may have problems and those games don't can be related to the vastly different types of operations SL is performing. It uses the CPU far more than the GPU, and quickly swaps textures in and out of memory. The games you mentioned don't do that.

With ATI card, in the advanced setup, make sure to turn off fastwrite, that caused a lot of crashes for me, but once I turned off (and keep off now for all updated driver version) I do not crash at all..

Make sure Shadows are disabled in your graphics setup. That seems to be the single most common cause of this type of crash since the 1.6 update.

That shouldn't still be happening since 1.6.7. Are you finding you crash with shadows turned on still?

Ash, sorry for not asking this earlier, but you don't have ATI VPU Recovery turned on, do you? If so, turn it off, and there's a good chance that'll fix your problem.