I'm crashing too much on my notebook!!!

Hi'ya, I'm just coming back from a long sl-break, at this moment I'm not at home and I've been trying to play SL on my laptop, it's a Sony Vaio fe890n. Now I've been connecting using a wlan, very laggy and often crashing, I tried to test it today with a regular cable internet of a friend and I'm very disappointed! SL wont stop crashing no matter what, here is a small list of I've been experiencing so far:

* If I try to click on a dialog button (those from scripted items) I will crash at least half of the time;
* When renaming an item, I can't press enter or it will crash;
* Can't cross any Sim or it crashes;
* My clothes are gone sometimes... Yes! That is, I only see my skin and attachments, even the ones arround me will see I'm totally naked! I tried to change clothes, nothing happens;
* The friends list is gone, all I see are (waiting...);
* Can't read profiles, SL often crashes when doing so;
* Crashes randomly like 5x in less than 10 minutes;
* Once I crash, SL wont let me back: "Your account is being logged right now...." sometimes it takes up to half an hour to log back in, also weird messages like my account not being available or "Despite our best effots, something has gone wrong".

Is there any chance I would play SL again? I'm using windows vista and both problems above happened on my wlan and a regular cable internet, on the cable it was just faster to rez everything. My anti virus says I have no virus or spywares and I got no firewall.

SL has gotten more demanding in the last few months. What you describe is really to be expected on most wireless connections; unless it is a VERY strong virtually empty link, I wouldn't even try it.

SL has also gotten more demanding on video. Please post the machine specs from your laptop (if you can stay in SL long enough, do Help/About and cut/paste the description of your machine here).

wow how many bad reasons for that to be happening can you quote in your post, so sorry for you. k Vista isn't that compatable with SL, I had to rollback and dual boot back into XP just for SL. So if you have the space to do that on your laptop I would recommend that. I know laptops don't have a lot of drive space so that's probably a no-go. Try and update your video card, there may be a more stable driver now available, or vista may be the driver you have, which is a bad thing. And if you can patch in a LAN, I have a laptop and log on from random hotels when I travel but just to check messages, I don't dare to move because yes you will crash. If you can also slap in a shiny new 1 gig stack of RAM into your book, I did that a while ago and it helped so much, set me back about 80 bucks and gave me 2 GIGs of RAM, if you have under a GIG now you may be in trouble, but I use my laptop a lot so it was worth it for me. Hope that helps.

last lil update that somebody told me a few months ago when I got my laptop. my tower is a monster but my laptop is a piece of crap compared to it so I have different settings on my SL client for both. go into your SL preferences, you dont even have to log onto SL to edit them, in fact it may be better if you don't.

clear your cache out, set your max cache size to 200 megs, this takes longer to rez places you don't go a lot but ups performance. minimize your graphics to the absolute lowest you can go, IE surface textures, take off bumpmapping, shiny, localized lighting, that sort, set your draw distance to the minimum it will go. it's not the same immersive experience but I am sure you would just be happy to actually move over see something shiny and lit up. but the smaller cache size helped me a lot, also check your max bandwidth, if it is set higher than your available streaming speed, you are on WIFI after all, then you will definately crash I have my laptop set around 200 kbps. and I also found that running SL in a self contained window helped a bit as well. at least you can force it to quit if it does sieze up a lot easier.

the computer is a 1.6ghz duo, 1gb ram and a geforce go 7400

which, altho not stellar, should be doing the task, my current garage computer is a 1.7ghz celeron 512 mb ram and a geforce 4mx, uber crapness, and still does playable

as far as wireless it all depends, wifi @ my parents house hooked up to a 12mb cable line is just dandy

my clearwire radio internet @ 1.5 mb is just fine, the girlfriend can stream netflix and ill be on secondlife with no issues

wifi at a dorm, starbucks or any other public access point would probally be clogged at the isp connection. altho ive had no issues in hotels, during conferences, with SL

to the op, what i would do is get all windows updates THEN update all your drivers

It has 2GB of memory but I think the rest what Osgeld Barmy said is right

If you haven't noticed, I said in my first post that I also tested Second Life on a regular cable internet, I had no lag but the crashes and weirdness were just the same! My Windows is all up to date, does it worth installing Windows XP on it so SL would work better?

I run SL on Vista with no problem. If I use the 'official' client, SL sucks turnips. I use the Nicholaz client and very rarely have a crash.

Sounds like the HW should be doing the job. Several folks have had problems with VIsta, but before changing OS I would update the video driver. Be sure to uninstall the old one first.

This could happen if your cache was corrupted or being interfered with by your antivirus. Norton and McAfee can cause major issues; if you have one of those, try deleting your cache, turning off your virus checker, and logging in. To delete the cache, delete the entire directory: "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\SecondLife" (you will have to reset your preferences afterwards).