HARD Crashes, All the time, impossible to fix, WHY.

SL has just been making my computer HARD CRASH for the past few patches, I just don't play it much anymore, it's a TIME BOMB. I can last, what....an hour before my screen just goes blank, and my monitors gets the orange light, meaning some sort of failure. I have to turn my PC off by holding in the button.

Sometimes not even an hour, sometimes 5 minutes.

It's a joke, I haven't been able to play like I used to for months, and there's been NO fixes

yes i've updated and the usual stuff.

The only recent 'fix' i've tried is turning off a buffer option in advanced graphics options, but still did not fix my CRASHES.

What can I do, less time on SL means less profit


Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz

Ram : 2048MB RAM 3200

Card: Sapphire RADEON X800XL AGP 256mb

OS : Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2

PSU : 650w

I know what you can do wait for a Linden to post in this section, untill then you'll have to have you hand on your head and and prey....
I've had the same problems and found myself posting replys to many other threads about the same kind of issues. If you look at my other posts you'll see that this is not just a few random people that are having this problem.... What i dont understand is if I downgrade to a previous version of SL its still a major issue where as before i was never getting these problems ever. A friend of mine told me to get another graphics card.... I was like "why?".... my card has been fine all these updates and in game i can see the sim textures and other peoples avatars fine so i find it hard to belive that a graphics card is the issue.
Yeah i agree less time on sl means less profit and fun and everything else.... With all this extra time that i could be on SL i find myself writing these posts... well atleast im working on my typing skills *shrugs*.

Why do these types of posts never include system specs? They never even say what OS they're using.

Open the Help menu and do About SecondLife. Copy/paste what's in there.

ooh yeah, how could I forget, how foolish.

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz

Ram : 2048MB RAM 3200

Card: Sapphire RADEON X800XL AGP 256mb

OS : Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2

PSU : 650w

System Specs why will that make a difference, The previous versions worked fine and then i installed the latest version and it still crashed. So i then downgraded to a previous version one that worked before and still the same problems.

Also OS should not matter cause I have found that people on Windows and Mac OS are having the same problems. Its not limited to one OS.

Any ways here:
CPU: Dual PowerPC 970 (1800 MHz)
Memory: 2049 MB
OS Version: Darwin 8.9.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.9.0: Thu Feb 22 20:54:07 PST 2007; root:xnu-792.17.14~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 1.5 NVIDIA-1.4.18
LLMozLib Version: 1.1.0 (Mozilla GRE:1.8.0.10_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 0/758 (0.0%)

I used to have crashing problems. I would have sworn that I had updated my drivers and everything was kosher on my end until I compared my Help->About Second Life info with somebody else who had a very similar setup. I noticed that the OpenGl version on my system was lower than the other persons. I updated the video drivers again and the problem went away.

Help->About Second Life doesn't have tons of info in it but it does provide a consistent set of info across all platforms.


Uh.. Because, almost without exception, hard crashs are caused by drivers and different hardware has different drivers?


Different OS' usually have different drivers, too..

Yes, i understand that but the point is its a problem on both regardless of the OS.

Really? My machine runs SL just fine..

Like I said before not all people are effected but how come all of a sudden loads of people are reporting these problems...? So they all have faulty systems?
I need answers not corrections...
Also I checked and I'm running the latest version of OpenGL. So my drivers are uptodate.

There have been known issues with the dual core processors.. There are plenty of threads on that too.. You have to turn one of them off or something lol.. Check into that .. It might be the root of your problems.. Well that and ATI cards have been causing people problems too..
As far as the 5200 Nvidia card, it is below recommended specs, however I used one up until about a month ago with no problems.. *shrugs*

But that has never been a problem before... So all of a sudden now its gonna be an issue?
Oh and i dont have dual core processors. Its not an intel Mac im using.


P.S Thanks for everyones input... this will help to get to the route of this problem.

It's a shame there's no set in stone fix, it's really annoying not being able to play.
My opengl stuffs all up to date too, hmphf

hi simon,

is there any way of monitoring the temperature of that gfx card? i'm very suspicious about the blank screen and monitor shutdown after a very specific amount of time.

it's been a while since i had an ATI card but isn't there a Catalyst control panel feature that's supposed to prevent crashing? failing that, you might have better luck with the Omega drivers..unofficial though they are.

good luck!

Uh not really, unless I get a 3rd party program which can detect it, however I can't see how that'd be accurate.

And I'd really prefer to stay away from unofficial drivers, I tried them before and the results were less than desirable

Have you made sure that power management isn't turned on?
One hour sounds suspiciously like a power manage / sleep feature in the OS.
I once had a tech call to a persons home whose computer turned off after one hour
and she had the hard drive optioned to sleep after an hour.

Worth a try to check it. Here's hoping its something that simple?

Turned on where, the monitor? Nah definately not, i'd have to be idle for that to happen. When my monitor goes orange there's no way of getting the screne back without restart, meaning that it's probably the gfx card / something else / hardware

I had an Acer 2.4ghz AMD processor with an ATI Radeon 9200 gfx card, and 512 mb ram, always has and apparently still does, run SL perfectly apart from the odd soft crash.
I recently bought a new Asus with 1 gig ram, 3.6 gig processor and an ATI Radeon 9600/x1050 card. From day 1 I cant stay in SL long without it totally locking up my comp which means I have to reboot using the button on the tower.
Its a dual-core processor and Ive done the disabling 1 part of it trick and its still crashing.
any ideas why 2 similar spec comps would run SL so differently

My 4 year old laptop actually runs it (slowly) and has a crap nondescript card in it, however the 14inch screen is just to small to look at for to long.

Any ideas on all this???? Tech support had no brilliant solutions.

turn out I had 7.3 ATI drivers but I then upgraded to 7.4.

I survived last night after testing for an hour or so maybe. Tested it out again today, left SL on and went outside to sun bath, came backabout hour n a half later to a black screen

Bahhhh the problem persists

lookin at youuu....mister linden

Well I've installed the omega drivers, hopefully they're for the best...

Another configuration (copy/pasted from about SL) that bites the dust:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 (Unknown model) (2992 MHz)
Memory: 2048 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7800 GTX/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.0.0

Only, unless Dell cheated on me, it is a Pentium D, 3 GHz, 4G RAM.

I subscribed yesterday and had to push the restart button >10 times since then.
I also replaced the affinity to 1 cpu but this doesn't change anything.

So probably I should replace drivers. But I doubt if I will. I hate repairing things that ain't broken.
Changing drivers for "perhaps" getting 1 program working? For the moment I have 63 application icons on my desktop. What will happen to the 62 others?

I've had no crashes sinec i've had these OMEGA drivers

Seem to have done the trick so far, although i'll probably crash as soon as I post this.....

While I can't help solve this issue, I can tell you that most likely your seeing the 4 GB bug in XP. It's caused by a funky setting which on a CPU running in 32 bit mode windows or that is 32 bit and how it maps memory so even if you have it it's not usable because the area that should map that to memory is used for another purpose... 64 bit CPU's running on 64 bit OS's (Windows XP 64, Vista 64, or 64 bit Linux, etc) don't have this issue...

If you have 4gig + ram

First make sure that all the memory is recognized in the BIOS, if not then you need to enable memory remapping in bios, and be sure PAE is in, if you do not see all ram even in bios, you will need a bios update, if your motherboard support 4gig (doesnt anyone nowadays) it will show up correct in bios after this is enabled, tho your os is still limiting how much you actually will get, winxp 32bit ~ 3327~3750mb on 4gig usually.

For mine is ;
Advanced chipset futures,
go to dram config,
set H/W mem remap 4gig ram support ; enabled

PAE?
PAE increases the physical address space (the address space that the CPU can use to access the memory chips on your computer) from 32 bits to 36 bit -intel (amd 40 bits).

Virtual address space is still 4GB, on 32bit os/cpu you will still only have 3.xx gig availible, for more you need 64bit os/cpu (wich shouldnt be a issue nowadays)