Slow Performance

Ive just installed Second Life and have created an account.

The thing is when I start Second Life its really slow. ie On the page where you type in your name and password the letters take about 10 seconds to appear after ive pressed the keys.

The system is an Athlon XP 2000, 1gb DDR266, GeForce 4 mx and an ata100 harddrive. The OS install is Windows 2000 which is only about a week old.
My CPU is always running at 100% when Second Life is running.

I meet the requirements set out on the Second Life website but its just not working.
Am I missing something or should I just admit its not going to work? Ive got a P42ghz, 1gb RAM Geforce 4mx and ata100 hdd system which I could get on the net.... does anyone think this will work better? The P4a 2ghz isnt much different from the Athlon XP 2000 but either way both are far higher than an 800mhz which is the minimum recommended.


Hope someone can help me!

Many Thanks.... errrrr Zeus Richez

no worries.
I just upped the shared RAM from 4mb to 64mb and its working great now

The main problem with Athlon's and the like, is they are 'almost' full set CPU's. The lack some features needed by heavy graphics games like SL. In addition the sped of the processors quoted are not the core speeds of these cut down chips. FSB speeds, memory mapping speeds, internal/external cache sizes for the chip play a big part, that why you pay the bigger bucks for the 'grown up chips'.

The cut down chips are more than adequate for the majority of PC/Mac programmes like emails, wordprocessing even excel, but throw a few thousand polygons and shaders at them, and they crawl. Adding more memory to both the base ram and certainly the graphics card will help someway, but in reality that like putting wide wheels and bigger seats into a small engined car, it just appears a softer ride.