Laptops Vs. 1.10

I've posted to another thread here a few times about the problems I've been having since the update. I just got off the phone with LL tech support, and was told that my specific problem seems to be most common with laptop users. She said that they're gathering data on the problem, so in hopes that this is indeed true, I'd like to hear from other laptop users having the same problems I am.

I can log in just fine. Sometimes I can stay in game for up to 2 hours, other times I crash every 2-3 minutes. It's always a hard crash, and crash logger always goes off. It's usually when I'm camming around somewhere, but not always.

I'm using a Dell XPS M170 laptop, Pentium M processor, 2.26 GHz, 2 gig RAM, NVidia Ge Force GO 7800 GTX Graphics card. Note that I powered up my old Alienware laptop this morning, and had the same results in game.

I've updated the drivers, I've rolled back the drivers, I've uninstalled and reinstalled SL, I've turned on sun/moon only, I've turned off avatar vertex, I've lowered all of the settings that I can, I've reset the modem and router, I've shut off the firewall, and I've already downloaded the update that was released just an hour or so ago.

I'm disabled, I *need* to use a laptop computer, it's not just a matter of convienence for me. This is a high-end machine that damn well should be able to handle anything thrown at it.

So gang, whoever else is using a laptop and having these same types of issues, please post here in hopes that we'll give them enough data to choke a horse, and then can get a fix for this. Thanks.

i'm in the same boat with you claire, i'm using a gen1 xps 3.4ghz 2gb ram and ati radeon 9700 vid. additionally, sims with malls with lots of vendors (scripts) give me fits, and i'm almost completely reduced to hanging out in my skybox to avoid lagging/crashing.

like you, i've unin/rein and every permutation in between (although i had been running the latest video drivers for some time), but still the hard crashes, complete system lockups and generally poor performance.

i'm sure you're as disheartened as i am to have, what seemed like at the time of purchase, a state-of-the-art piece of equipment reduced to not much more than a pretty (and pretty expensive) paperweight.

Exactly the same problem with a top of the range Sony Vaio. Was fine until they rolled out this release, now I log in and crash immediately.

I have the exact same computer you do Claire, and the problem for me seems to be overheating in the case especially on the video card. I wasn't able to download new drivers for it however, and the main problem is that I don't have ripple water anymore. Otherwise, it runs fine other than the crashing.

Sometimes it takes a few hours to crash. Other times the crash happens as soon as I hit the log in button. Always to blue screen crashes too, not just a client crash. It is very reassuring to know that LL is looking into the problem. Thanks for posting this

I am having the same problem with my laptop. I have taken my laptop to Best Buy and they have updated all my drivers, I have taken basically everything off my laptop, i have done a disk cleanup, uninstalled and reinstalled SL, and tried changing everything in my preferences and I literally cannot stay in game more than 30 secs. This is crazy!! I wish they could give us the option of keeping 1.9 instead of making us update to 1.10. I never had any problems up until this 1.10 update.

Same

Damm good Toshiba Satellite Pro - can handle everything in the software world except SL (1.10)

Longest time in-world so far was 10 minutes then crash logger.

( at least todays release gives me a crash logger - before it just froze )

I'm on a Dell Latitude D810 with ATI Radeon X300 and 1.5G ram, runs great so far.

Second Life is running fine on my laptop (Dell Latitude D600) with the side effect that something (I'm currently pointing fingers at SL) broke most of Windows. Explorer.exe is leaking memory left and right and just after I installed SL 1.10 I had to force-close it because EVERYTHING froze up. Crashlogger triggered when I restarted my computer.
Trillian and other IM clients refuse to start and I am unable to browse my hard drive (i.e. Internet Explorer is broken--yes it's the same program that browses your drives, try typing a URL into the bar).

Currently I'm running off of the command prompt and the Task Manager to browse my hard drive and start programs.

I have a HP Pavillion dv8000t laptop. It has an Intel Core Duo (1.6 Ghz) processor, 1 GB RAM and NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 graphics with 256 MB RAM. It is a dual boot for both Windows XP and SuSE Linux 10.1. I have SL installed on both operating systems. Other than a rough start with SL 1.10 on the Linux I have had no problems. Times online have been from minutes to hours. It was not advertised as a gaming machine so I always wonder if crashing is inevitable.

I'm on a Dell Inspiron 6000 and everything seems to be fine for me.

..... just remember, when LL says "we're sorry, your computer cannot support SL" they are sometimes wrong.

I'm on a Dell Inspiron 2200 (CeleronD/370 (1.5ghz) 1.2gb Ram) and I'm working fine.. I was sooo not looking forward to the 1.10 upgrade as I figured this little laptop would finally choke on the thing we call the SL client.. I'm pleasantly surprised, in that I've crashed several times since the upgrade on my 'big-mama' home system (P4D/2.8gb/2gb ram/Nvidia GF6200-256mb, and not once on this little laptop... Great thing about this lappy is that I bought it a few months ago on the Dell Outlet for $420!! I now have maybe $600 into it (ram upg/wifi card/larger hd).... Can't beat it! and it even runs SL!!!! YAY!!!!!!

Tas

I have had the same experience with crashing post update. I have an Acer Travelmate 8100 - 2GHz, 1Gb Ram, ATI Mobility radeon x700 128Mb graphics. When SL runs, it runs better than before the update, textures load quicker, the whole experience seems smoother. Then after an unpredictable amount of time (10mins to an hour?) with no warning symptoms it dies and sends a crash log. Since Acer is poor at providing updated drivers, I've followed advice posted in various places on the web and on these forums to install the 6.4 desktop Catalyst drivers, which I did prior to the 1.10 update. Frustrating.

Just to let you know, for a tid bit more money, you could have gotten the Latitude version which is an all around higher quality machine and will last you MUCH longer (the Inspirions are very light-travel light-use machines). Got an unlimited 3-year warranty?

my secondary pc is an averatec laptop with no-name onboard video. never ran sl very well to begin with, but yea, now instant crash on login.

Thanks for all the responses guys, keep them coming! The more info LL has, the better the chances of a hopefully quick fix.

Just a side note, I did log on from my desktop today without a single problem, unfortunately I can't sit there for longer than about 30 minutes at a stretch. But it does at least disprove some of the "it's your ISP/cable modem/router/firewall" theories I've seen floating around the forums, since all 3 machines obviously use the same for each of those, and only my laptops are affected by the problem.

This has me worried, has it been resolved yet Claire. I was about to place an order for a new laptop which must be capable of playing SL well. The Dell that you have was top of the list. I considered a Macbook Pro as a possibility also but there seems to be issues from that camp too. Since 1.10 my Powerbook G4 and P4 based Toshiba laptops have been unplayable. Are there any other alternatives.

I was having instant crash on log in yesterday on Alienware M7700(geforce go 6800), although it worked ok when i logged in at a different region to the one I logged out in.
I went to Alienware site and got new video driver and its ok now but Im thinking more co incidence that actually fixed hehe.

The Dell XPS M170 with same Go 7800GTX as the original poster has not had any problems with crashes *yet*

Both however now have the ripple water option greyed out since 1.10, so Im thinking in the new update they maybe messed up something related to mobile graphics cards.

oh on the subject of laptops and SL

Alienware have a new one now that is very powerful, think it uses AMD Turion and dual SLI cards, it costs a fortune though and I bet is a "boat-anchor" more than it is a "lap top".

I have 2 Laptops that work for SL, made by the only 2 makers I thought made them powerful enough, heres a mini review lol

Alienware area 51M 7700
Pros:
Very good screen, not shiny and native resolution of 1440x900 is good for the 17 inch size.
Was (at the time) cheaper than the Dell equivelant.
Can take 2 hard drives.
this one is p4 3.2 and geforce go 6800, runs SL very well

Cons:
It weighs a ton.
It gets very hot and blasts hot air from the left side vent, makes surface very hot too.
Both the above and the low battery life make it not really that mobile.


Dell XPS M 170
Pros:
Very very fast, as fast as very good desktop.
Boots unbelieveably fast(after removal of junk).
Runs nice and cool.
nice and light with fairly good battery life.
Looks nicer IMHO, has silly lights all over it but I turned most of those off in BIOS.

Cons:
The native screen resolution is 1990 x something, ridiculously high for 17 inch screen, I defy anyone to be able to read text etc that tiny.
The screen is very shiny and the picture it gives is a lot more washed out than the alienware, although playing with the cards vibrance controls does help a bit.
It only has one hard drive.
Keyboard is more squished up and harder to use than Alienware, and no numeric pad.

Dell are a pain for installing a load of junk like AOL, and loads of 30 day (naggy) trials of stuff they presumably get kickbacks to put on there, there must have been 10 icons in the bottom right of taskbar when I first booted that and about 4 regular "later" pop ups, I reformatted it after seeing this.

If you get one from Dell, do it over the phone, dont use the site, site can take weeks, I ordered this one over the phone on thursday and it came monday morning, also kick up a BIG fuss about them sending you the windows disk with it, they dont do this as standard practice(presumably related to the deal with the naggy trials, they dont want it being that easy to get rid of them).

My Dell Inspiron 6000 runs SL almost perfectly. No crashes since the 1.10 update, and it can stand 3-4 hours in world. The only thing I have detected is a small (two, three seconds) pause sometimes in very crowded places. I don't remember it from 1.9.

Specs:
1Mb RAM
ATI Radeon X300
Drivers from mid-2005, didn't care to update

So maybe it's something to do with new graphic cards? hope it gets solved soon!

If it's mainly laptops suffering then it seems it must be an issue with the drivers for mobility cards in general?

Thanks Craig, thats some very very useful information there. I have ordered from Dell before and they have been very good. I installed a Dell desktop for someone and as you say it was riddles with promotional crap. I didnt look if there was a disk suppled with it.

Got the same issues as most of ya, Crash after login. Just can't run out and buy a new laptop just to buy a new one on the next up date from LL SL. Anyone know of any good third party drivers that have worked? Thanks Steve

Well after reading through most of these post Desktops are having big problems also with the same issues also. Steve

i hate to be the doomsayer here but having spent a good deal of time reading thru the forum and talking with friends, the problems in running sl are not unique to those of us who are primarily users of notebooks. additionally, the problems are so varied and widespread that it's difficult to guage whether it makes sense to go to the high end of the hardware spectrum at all, as i've seen people running sl successfully on equipment barely above the minimum requirements.

unfortunately...we appear to be at the whim of the sl gods...

i had a similar problem on my hp zt3000 laptop ..I was getting real tired of crashing evey 10 minutes .. usually when rapid change of camera view..therefore blaming video..But after finding this website and making some of the changes i ran 3 hours the next night with no crashes.. pretty drastic change considering i was about ready to give up SL .. like the site mentions i would only make a few changes at a time ..and document ( on paper) what you have done incase you want to reverse it .i have not had any problem after changes ..its tedious to go thru the list but was well worth the time ..Hope it helps There are other simlar websites covering the same info

http://www.dead-eye.net/WinXP%20Services.htm or www.theeldergeek.com