New Laptop and SL

Ok I got a new used laptop I installed SL on it and it meets the specs but keeps getting hung up at initializing world. It's a P4 2.4 gig processor but only has 256 of ram (getting more ram in the mail later this week) It has an ATI graphics card not sure of the speed but I think it's 64 mb can anyone help me figure out how to get it to play SL?

Are you on a wireless connection?

Nope it's wired. and disturbing new development after it hangs for a while it give me a device failure message and tells me to reboot

Can you identify the specific graphics card? ATI started bringing out a new line (320M and 340M) which are actually the 7000 chipset; consequently, it doesn't meet our Minimum System Requirements (Radeon 8500) and will typically crash after "initializing world" as all incompatible cards do.

You can help identify the card with the following link:
http://secondlife.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Identifying+your+graphics+card

Is the processor a GeForce2Go?

RADEON IGP 340M DDR x86/SSE2 that is what SL says I have for a graphics card. I finally managed to get it to connected to SL and my avatar renders but the background does not.

Ouch. The 340M is based on the RADEON 7000 chipset. Since Second Life requires a RADEON 8500 or better, it's not fully compatible with Second Life.

Alright, similar problem, not trying to hijack your thread here:

I also have a laptop with a Radeon IGP 340M and I've used DH Mod Tool to apply the latest set of Catalyst drivers to the thing. Well, I get in-game just fine but the only textures that load are the sky and my avatar's skin/clothes. That's it. Everything else is this weird unshaded grey, or whatever color happens to be the below-ground color based on time of day.

So, does anyone know of a workaround to this problem at all? As of right now SL's nothing more than a glorified chat client for me at the moment.

On another note, http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/ will vastly improve the quality of your graphics on your laptop, Maeve. Whether or not it holds the key to getting SL to work on this bloody card... that's anybody's guess.

Sigh. Gotta love ATI....

Step 1: Call ATI and bitch at them for not having full OpenGL driver support.
Step 2: Repeat step 1 every single day for a couple of years.
Step 3: Download the drivers once they actually make them right.

--Alternative Solution--

Step 1: Call Microsoft AND Apple and bitch at them for not having an Apple implementation of DirectX
Step 2: Repeat Step 1 every single day for a few years.
Step 3: Download the new DirectX SecondLife client when Apple finally implements DirectX.

*sigh*
Okay, these are, of course, a bit facetious - but I want to illustrate the problem with the current 3D graphics situation:

There are 2 major "hardware-level" systems for creating 3D graphics - OpenGL and DirectX.

LindenLab could spend several years coming up with their own rendering technology - but then they'd either have to try to get all the manufacturers to support their system; or they'd have to implement it in software, which would be 100 to 1,000 times slower than a "hardware" system like DirectX or OpenGL.

DirectX, because of Microsoft's muscle, has become fairly-well implemented across the major hardware manufacturers. However, it only runs on Windows (and since it is built on top of the Win32 API, it probably would be difficult to port to MacOS).

OpenGL is an open standard that anyone can implement; but because its open, it evolves much more slowly as everyone bickers about the best way to do things - and there's no uniform implementation (because there's no way to "force" manufacturers to adhere to the standard). Many manufacturers support only a small sub-set of the features; or "cheat" to try to boost their numbers - yet they all claim full OpenGL support.

This is one of the (many) reasons you have so much more gaming on the PC than the Mac... And also one of the reasons why cross-platform 3D games (i.e. OpenGL ones) tend to have more graphical troubles.

Its not necessarily the fault of the game-programmers; its the graphics-hardware-makers who have poor & incomplete OpenGL implementation of the systems they claim to support. And this is not limited to ATI - nVidia and many other hardware companies have had this issue in the past.

Take care,

--Noel "HB" Wade
(Tread Whiplash)