WinXP 945chips crash after 5 minutes

I am running Windows XP on a Dell Latitude D820 laptop, 2GB RAM, with the 945 video chipset. I live in the Middle East. Every time I enter SL, I get very slow response and then after about 5 minutes my laptop crashes, complete with dump of physical memory.

Any suggestions?

Thanks. HS.

I didn't think the intel integrated was an option in the Dell D820, but it could have been. It also had nice video card options. Sadly, the intel integrated video in that chipset is not supported by SL. I heard it actually runs though, but its really poorly.

You may be able to get it working without crashing. First step, if you are running all the drivers from the CD that came with the machine, or downloaded off Dell's website, then your drivers need updating. At the minimum, you'll want to get the latest chipset and video drivers straight from Intel's website.... all Dell does is take these drivers, slap Dell's name on them, make sure it installs and seems to work, then puts them up for download on Dell's website. Sadly this process takes them sometimes 6 months to a year, and the old driver they have up will have problems.

The Intel 945 chipset is supported, but it is the minimum requirement according to the system requirements page.

Try running SL in full screem mode. I think there is a box in the graphics preferances page for this.

You could also try the Windlight First Look viewer it seems to be more stable with lower end graphics. Just don't expect great frame rates.

Hope this helps..

the 945 is a really craptastic chip, it will not run well, end of story

but it also should not be crashing, have you updated ALL the drivers to the system? is there 64 megs of ram (or better) for the video to use ? are there background applications running (especially next to the clock) if your gonna run with a barebones video system your going to need to free up as much cpu and ram as possible to even have a shot

i just checked the Sys Reqs page... when did they add "945 chipset" in to Windows Reqs? That does not make any sense at all, it didn't used to be supported, and people with problems with those were specificly told they weren't supported.

Macs with those chipsets/graphics still arent supported (but it works) yet Windows is now? I could understand if they wanted to support intel 965 chipsets, that have video that can actaully do things like Hardware T&L, but the old craptastic 945s?

They shouldn't even write it as intel 945, because thats not the video part of the chipset. the 945s had the Intel GMA950, where the 965s have the GMA3000 series.

I think there has been some serious decision screw ups to get that added to the Reqs page.

agreed

Unfortunately a consistant crashing after a short period of time from startup on a laptop, (somtimes followed by an even faster crash on immediate reboot and restart of SL) is a good indication of a heat problem.

Sometimes you can lower your CPU clock by hand int he aptop power settings and that helps, but you can't do that with the GPU unfortuantely.

Sometimes finding a better airflow solution can help too.

I don't get why this is such a bad thing. Surely if LL can write software that provides all the candy for high end graphics but still runs ok on low end, that would be a good thing.

Hi, Hajar. When you look at the type of graphics device you have, is it just the Intel 945, or the Intel 945GM or GML or something like that?

SL is considerably less happy with the Mobile (GMx) versions of Intel chips than with the desktop versions. That said, it is sometimes possible to tune your installation so that they work; I routinely run SL on the (completely unsupported by SL) Intel 915GM chips; it doesn't run fast and the laptop requires a cooling pad, but it does run.

Here's a set of things I've done on my ancient laptop; this was written before the Windlight client, so the names of some settings may have changed if you are using that:

-- Run in full-screen mode (not a window the size of your screen, actual full-screen where you have to use ALT-TAB to switch to another app). You do this by unchecking "Run in Window" in the General tab of preferences.

-- Set the memory for your graphics card (Advanced Graphics tab) to something lower than 128MB. Amazingly, my frame rate went up when I set mine to 64. You won't hurt anything if you set it too low.

-- Set the graphics sliders for Object Mesh, Flexible Mesh, Tree Detail, Avatar Detail etc. all the way to the left. You can inch up the settings once you get to the point where you don't crash.

-- Set your graphics distance to 64 (the minimum). Generally speaking, leave it there.

-- Make sure all cool options for VBO, shiny and suchlike are NOT enabled.

-- Get a cooling pad or just prop your laptop up on coasters and get a small fan to blow under it. The Intel chips have no hardware graphics assist, so force the processor to do rendering in software. Things get very hot, and the first thing to go in your laptop is generally the RAM, it seems.

If you are still crashing, try limiting your network bandwidth to 300kB or so in SL's Network preferences tab. That may sometimes prevent textures from being downloaded faster than your PC can handle.

Good luck!

it already does, the problem with it is that that intel card DOES NOT HAVE what is needed to even do the barebones stuff (such as hardware T & L)

it might as well say NEC power VR, or 3dfx voodoo (1)

its like trying to drive a car with wooden tires, im sure you could but wow, same thing, your trying to do 3d graphics on something that was totally unqualified 10 years ago

Thanks everyone. The problem seems to be related to network bandwidth. I changed my location and everything is working hunky dory.

Cheers everyone.
HS.