SL no longer starts *after* updating to latest drivers

Card: ATi FireGL 8800 (128Mb RAM) - it's based on a Radeon 8500 but you can't use Radeon drivers on it.
OS: XP Pro
CPU: Athlon XP

I've used SL on this PC for over a year. All was well and although my graphics card is quite old I thought SL still runs OK. But I'd have occasional system crashes when running other OpenGL programs (like World of Warcraft) and lots of crashes running DirectX games.

So I updated the drivers to the last one ATi made for this card. All my other programs run fine, but now SL gives the "GDI Generic" error on startup.

Before anyone asks, this is *definitely* the latest driver. It's dated 15/02/2005, the old one was dated 2004 something.

Funnily enough I had PM on this forum from someone else who couldn't get SL working on the same card and I said I could help because it had always worked fine on my PC. I guess he had the latest drivers as well.

Please let my know what information LL needs to fix the detection problem.

anyone? Don't LL read this forum? What is the point of it if staff ignore it?

You might want to try removing your settings.ini file (or renaming it first) and see if that helpt. Maybe the "Probe Hardware" option does not work correctly after the driver update. If this doesn't work, try wiping the SL installation and reinstall it from scratch.

Richard! I was wondering where you've been!

A couple things....

A Radeon 8500 is the absolute minimum supported by SL. It sounds like your card may be iffy on support - but have you called the 0800 number and asked for help? (Yes, I know that might be futile) If you don't have it, its (00) 800 722 00010 in the UK.

Secondly, why are you still using that card? Firewire support or something?

I know here in the states, an nVidia card that blows away the minimum specs for SL is incredibly cheap (under US$100) - is that an option at all? While you shouldn't *have* to do this... I'd think at the very least it would improve your SL experience.

Hope you get it worked out soon... we're missing you!

A lot of Residents help each other here. While I'm not tech support, I help with community and see if there are interrelated issues--it helps especially when many Resis are describing the same things. For official help, please do not hesitate to contact support, including using the phone number Travis listed.

And from what Travis says it sounds like you are dearly missed so hope you can come back inworld soon.

1. Ok, uninstalled SL and deleted every SL related directory, reinstalled and it does the same thing.

2. I'm not phoning up support about this, 800 number or not. An autodetection problem can't be solved over the phone.

3. The reason I'm still using this card is because it works just fine. Although it's not exactly speedy in SL, it was OK for logging in and chatting and maybe flying about a bit, which is all I did really. Moreover, although it's the bare minimum for SL, World of Warcraft is completely playable on it. You really need to see WoW running on the same hardware to appreciate just how inefficient the SL client software is.

Also, my motherboard is AGP so if I upgrade the card I either have to buy an expensive card which I can only ever use on this PC (as all new ones are PCI-e) which is itself getting a bit long in the tooth. Or I buy a cheap card which doesn't offer much of an improvement which would be a waste when the card I've got works OK with every other OpenGL application except SL.

4. I'll email the support email address and see what they say. Hopefull if I send them the logfile they can work out why their autodetection doesn't work with this driver. Again I'll say that nothing changed on the PC except that I installed a *newer* driver. All other software still works fine and yet SL thinks I don't have a graphics accelerator at all.

Although it's nice that other people can offer suggestions on the forum, I still don't understand why official support has to be seperate from the forum. It isn't made at all clear in the forum headers that you're wasting your time posting about problems here because you'll have to repeat everything over the phone or email when you finally realise your question isn't going to be answered here. Would it really be so difficult to have support monitor the forum and even if they didn't answer every question, at least look for users who's problems have gone unanswered? I have a feeling a lot of people download an create accounts but never get going becuase they add here and it's ignored.