Dell Inspiron 2650 Laptop - Am I wasting my time?

I just came by a Dell Inspiron 2650 Laptop and am trying to get SL running. Everything appears to work except when in SL the video images (trees, people, etc.) cycle in and out of focus. The machine has a 1.2 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM some of which is used on the nVIDIA GeForce 2 video card.

I have a 3.5-year old Inspiron 8100, which has a 1 GHz PIII, 512 MB of RAM, and a GeForce 2 video card. It runs SL pretty well, albeit slowly. I haven't noticed any focus effects. What you are describing might be textures getting incrementally more sharp as more detail is streamed to your computer.

- Jon

It's not incremental in that it will go back and forth, sharp out of focus, sharp to out of focus, over and over. I'm hoping a preference change wil fix everything.

That's likely to be the cause of your problem. SL uses a high amount of video memory, and will shuffle textures around to get them to fit. You'll find that sort of in-and-out-of-focus effect is relatively common when running SL on a card with low (64 and under) video memory. How much memory do you have allocated to your video card?

It appear from the GeForce2 Go tab I've got 16 MB of adapter memory (AGP 4X). Is there a way to allocate more sytem memory to the video card?

According to Dell's website, the 2650's video RAM is external, and limited to a maximum of 16MB. Only the 2600's video RAM is shared. So no, it unfortunately looks like you're going to have to just deal with it.

Bummer! Thanks for confirming.

Bummer! Thanks for confirming my suspicions