My lil ole problems. (OMG DUO PROCESSORS!?)

Its been a while, since last june I think when I got my new laptop. And I've been plagued by this one doom ever since. First off, I should relate what I use to play SL. I have a Sager 5760, with 2 gig of ram and a 7800GTX video card with 256 of video ram. (A month later and I would have gotten the 512, curses!) Feast your eyes here!

http://www.powernotebooks.com/category.php?catId=26

And before I get started, yes I'm upgraded completely in all my drivers, directx, my hard drive is scanned and fine, my 2 gigs ram are beyond reproach. I've reinstalled the game each time an update is put out. All other games on my system run flawlessly. YES, I have tried the whole 'set the affinity' trick and it doesn't do a blasted thing. I've cleared the cache, tinkered with most of my settings, even reloaded windows. It keeps happening. I use Kaspersly Antivirus and Zonealarm for my firewall if anyone wants to know.


On to the problem itself. The SecondLife client makes my computer freeze, then unfreeze periodically. No its not a crash, lockup or lag. The game runs quite well on my computer, relatively no lag. At random times, the game first locks but my system is responsive. 1-2 seconds after that my windows interface locks. (meaning I cant clicky the buttons on the start bar) 3-4 sec after that, my mouse itself freezes. This lasts for about 10 seconds, there is no hard drive access during this period of time at all. Luckily, the vast majority of times responsiveness returns just like it never happened. The game sometimes reloads a few elements that are on my screen such as prims textures and stuff. (Kind of like when you're looking at the outside of a building and quickly push your cam inside, it looks like there's nothing there for a moment and then everything appears.)

After that I can play normally, with no ill effects. Rarely tho, maybe about 3 to 4 times since last june, the behavior was different. The game will freeze, then suddenly my screen will go black, followed by 5 or so seconds later a blue screen of death. Oddly enough even tho I have my system set NOT to restart on BSOD, it barely shows me the screen before restarting. (Might be an unrelated issue) Windows error logger informs me at restart that there was a serious error in my Nvidia drivers. Huh...

Now I cant seem to figure out what triggers them. Sometimes I'm walking around, sometimes flying, sometimes building, sometimes doing nothing at all. They don't seem to correspond to any particular time of (ingame) day, nor where I'm facing at the time. Lode on the server can vary as well as lag, its all random. At times I can go days without one freeze. Sometimes I'll get 5-7 in the course of one night. Sometimes one will follow another quickly. First the game will freeze, interface, mouse for 10 seconds, then the mouse will unfreeze and the game will remain frozen, after 4 seconds the mouse will freeze again and unfreeze and the game will return. Sometimes 3 or more can happen in a row like that.

Recently, after a pack of 4 of them windows sent me a message that I'd never received before. It said something like: "Your video drivers are crapping out on you, you'd better save your work and restart just to be safe" Or something to that effect. =) These freezes aren't restricted to ingame either. I've gotten freezes like that at the login screen before I'd even typed anything in. The most of those 3-4 freeze combos I've gotten have been DURING the login process, after a crash or bluescreen mostly.


I'm hoping by loading this post with as much of the behavior that I've observed that someone with keen coding knowledge might be able to see something that could tip me off on what could be causing these problems. They aren't gamestopping, but they ARE rather annoying, especially when I'm doing important ingame stuff.


Thank you to anyone who had patience enough to read this post. And thanks to anyone in advance for any tips that might help.

-Leira

So far as solving your problem with the current client goes, I can only offer the stock suggestions: do a complete uninstall of all versions of SL then reinstall, try older version of the driver, if you are using stock drivers and can find a souped up version, try that, or vice versa if applicable.

You might want to try the First Look client at http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php and see if that works better for you. (Expect it to have some different problem, though, it's bound to.