Please Help!

Can someone please help me. I'm a complete newb and I can't get the game to work. It keeps telling me my driver is out of date:Intel Extreme graphics card. They reccomended I upgrade to the latest driver free from Intel... but I read also that Intel isn't compatible.

The site suggested I upgrade to nVidia geforce 2 or higher, or Ati 8500 or higher. I followed the link they gave but I couldn't find either of those in there. So I searched the web looking for them. Barely found anything. But I downloaded the Ati Raedon, but it gave me this silly message that didn't make much since.. something about not being able to find the components... something that sounded like it was supposed to be real, but quite fishy (I think it was a run-on sentence or something.). Next thing I know... I can't find it in programs or anywhere and suddenly I have a million pop ups. So I restored my whole pc and tried again. With a different Ati and got the same thing. SO 2 restores later. I don't know what to do. It says intels aren't compatable. So even if the other nvidia or Ati drivers are ab;e to be used... I don't know which to use. Because I know nothing about this. I have XP sp2.

I just read this: That my graphics cards should be either "nVidia" or "ATI", otherwise your card may not be compatible with Second Life. Does this mean I can't play this game?

Sorry for writiing so much.

Intel is not supported.

You need to install a supported graphics card, whether it be nVidia or ATI.

They are inexpensive these days, and not hard to install.

nVidia and ATI are BRANDS. The drivers for them will only work for those brand cards. What you need is an actual piece of hardware, not a different driver.

Hi Callista. It sounds like your failrly new not just to SL, but to computing in general, so let me see if I can clear things up for you a little. As you may or may not know, computers are comprised of two main types of components, hardware and software. Hardware components are the physical objects that you can hold in your hand (although you shouldn't actually touch most of them, so don't get the wrong idea). Things like your hard drive, your graphics card, your sound card, etc. are all hardware. Software components are all the various programs and information in the computer. To illustrate, your screen is a piece of hardware, but the image you're seeing on it right now is a manifestation of software.

To put it in more human terms, your body, your organs, your brain, are all pieces of "hardware", and your thoughts, emotions, knowledge, and personality are your "software".

The Intel Extreme graphics card you saw mentioned in that error message is a piece of hardware inside your computer. To put it most simply, the graphics card is the hardware component responsible for delivering visual information from the computer to the monitor. When you took your computer out of the box for the first time and you plugged the monitor into it, the plug on the back of the computer that you stuck the cord into was part of the graphics card.

Your particular graphics card happens to have been manufactured by a company called Intel, and the name they chose for the product is "Extreme".

Drivers are the software that make specific peices of hardware function. They are small programs that tell the computer's brain how to operate all the various pieces of hardware it is connected to. Each and every hardware component in your computer has a unique driver.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's talk about the error message you saw when you tried to run SL. There were actually 2 errors happening there. The message was triggered by error number one, which is that your computer's graphics capabilities are not up to snuff for running Second Life. The second error was the cotent of the message itself, which was incorrect. I'll explain.

What happened was your computer recognized there was a graphics problem, but it didn't really understand what that problem actually was. For whatever reason, it assumed that the problem was software related, and it told you your graphics driver was out of date. In actuality, the problem was a hardware issue. Intel Extreme graphics cards are not supported by SL.

Now, as for that other message you saw when you tried to install the ATI Radeon driver, if you slow down and think about it in relation to everything I just told you, it makes perfect sense. It said it couldn't find the related components, right? What that meant is simple. You were trying to install a driver for a graphics card that you don't have. So of course it couldn't find it. It can't find a component that isn't there.

Your graphics card is an Intel Extreme. It will only work with Intel Extreme drivers. What you tried to install was the driver for an ATI Radeon card. In order for that to have worked, you wuld have had to have an ATI Radeon graphics card physically in your computer.

Think of it as if you were trying to put diesel fuel into a gasoline engine. It just ain't gonna work that way. Sure, you could put the fuel in the tank, but when you try to get the engine to run on it, you're gonna have problems.

Be grateful, by the way, that the installer was smart enough to recognize that the ATI card was not present, and that it consequently didn't allow you to procede with the installation. Had you actually installed that driver, its entirely possible that your Intel Extreme card would have no longer been able to function, which would mean you would no longer be able to see anything on your monitor. Obviously, that would not have been a good situation.

Anyway, the answer to your question, "Does this mean I can't play this game," officially is yes, that's what it means. Intel graphics cards are not supported by SL. To run it you need a card that IS supported, which means one branded either by ATI or by nVidia (I recommend nVidia). However, SOME computers with Intel Extreme cards are able to run SL with minimal quality settings. Some do, some don't. It looks like yours doesn't.

"Some do, some don't," by the way, is the what "not supported" means vs. "not compatible". "Not supported" means it wasn't designed to work with it, but it also wasn't designed not to, so it might. It usually won't, but it might. "Not compatible" would mean it definitely wouldn't work.

What you need to do is get yourself a proper graphics card. A lot of inexpensive computers come with those Intel Extreme cards because they're cheap. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for with them. If all you want to do is surf the web and write papers, those Intel cards work just fine, but try to run anything graphics intesnive on them and forget it.

The good news is workable graphics cards are not very expensive. High end gaming cards will run you as much as $500 or more, but you can get one that will work okay for as little as $50.

The first thing you need to find out is does your computer have an AGP slot or PCI Express slot in it to allow for a decent graphics card to plug in. It could have either, both, or neither. If it's neither, you might have a hard time. Modern graphics cards require AGP or PCI Express. If nothing else, your machine will have a bank of PCI slots in it, but PCI video cards are somewhat hard to find these days. It's pretty old technology. You can get a PCI card if it comes down to it, but you'll probably have to order it from somewhere. You won't be able to just walk into Best Buy and find one on the shelf these days.

If you don't know how to determine what type of expansion slots you've got, I'd highly recommend taking your computer to someone who does. You don't want to go poking around in there unless you have some idea of what you're looking at.

Anyway, this is turning out to be a pretty long post, so I'll stop now. Hope this helped. Good luck.

Thanks everyone. It was actually an easy fix. One I overlooked because I read INtel was not supported. I added something for my graphics controller from the Intel site. And I got it... although it is a little slow.