Second Life addict pleading for help

I was having the dredded crashes and freezing up so I had a bright thought about getting a bettre graphics card and yes this come with some advise from the sl support team to. Well I bought the GF 7600 GS thinking this is going to really help me. Well yeah it has helped with the freezing cause I cant even get logged in now. It comes up with ""Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers are out of date or unsupported. Please make sure you have the latest video card drivers installed. If you continue to receive this message, contact customer service". Ok so I track of to the Nvidia site and do what is needed there and yeah you guessed it, still the same notice when I try and log in. Just incase anyone has any ideas I have added some information about my computer which right now is on the last few days before I throw it out the window. Ok, Chip Vendor NVIDIA, Chip Type GF7600, Model Name N76G256D-RH, Bus Type AGP Bus, AGP Speed 8X Rate. Mainboard Information, CPU Vendor AMD, System Total Memory 523,760KB, System Free Memory 134,960KB. I am running Windows XP Home Edition, plus had AMD Sempron(tm) Processor, 3000+, 1.81 GHz, 512 MB of RAM. wow heaps of gear there. I do hope there is some one that might be able to help me and umm in simple terms cause I am not to cluey with computers. I just need to be able to get back into Second Life.

Did you uninstall the previous drivers first and do a clean reinstall?

yeah that was done.. had the ppl at the shop install the new card

bet you 5 bucks they installed the drivers that were on the included cd

which were probally 2 years old or even worse, the microsoft (do nothing) certified crap

have you tried installing the newest drivers off of nvidia.com?

yep I went to the Nvidia site and went thru the 3 steps to get the update.. and still nothing.. I was wondering whether to uninstall it and re-install it again.. I just dont know what to do

Aside from being more than a little low on memory, I think it should work.

At the login screen, do Preferences then click the About button on the window that pops up. Does the OpenGL version say 2.0.3? If you have the latest NVidia drivers, it should. I think.

I cant get to the login screen at all.. it wont load the game at all, just comes up with the message saying the drivers are out of date, then shuts off

"Drivers out of date"

Is annoying as hell, go back one driver version or two you wont see this , newest got me that msg to (vista and xp both done this)

Second thing to try is to uninstall any other driver your vid card might use except the actual ones from nvidia.com

I feel for you my friend, I wish I could help but dealing with issues of my own in terms of GC's. I hope it works out for you though- keep us posted. There are a lot of helpful folks here I've noticed

not that it should really matter, but have you tried reinstalling direct X? eventho SL is open GL and doesnt make use of DX, windows and DX are so intertwined with drivers it might have something? to do with it

directX download

I ran second life on a 7600 no problems at all, though mine wasn't fan cooled and had a meltdown after a 16hour session, , I reverted to a 6600 and it worked ok too, now I have an 8800, but it really is overkill for SL
So it's got to be drivers or something I suspect, if you haven'f got a fan on the graphics card then I suggest you get one to be sure, also 512 isn't much memory to work with I look at upgrading there too

What were the three steps you went through?

The Nvidia driver page has three boxes labled step 1, 2, and 3 for selecting the proper driver file to download.

Once you do those three steps you need to click on the Go button .

That takes you to a page that which has some links labeled "Primary Download Site", "Mirror Site 1", "Mirror Site 2", and "Mirror Site 3".

Once you click on one of those links you go to a page to accept or not accept the license.

Did you click the accept button and then get a dialog box with Open / Save / Cancel / Help ?

Did you then click save to dowload the file?

And once the file was downloaded, did you find the newly downloaded file and run it?

The way you said you did "the three steps" makes me wonder if you actually downloaded and installed the new driver.

Can you find your current driver version and tell us what it is?

well, make sure the drivers are installed right, so that when you go into display properties where you can select your Resolution and Refresh rate, that it actually says something like Default monitor on Geforce 7600GS .. or whatever... its its just on blank there is a problem. Also make sure its loading your desktop up at 65 thousand colors or higher on the colors... if its stuck down to like 16 colors SL wont be able to launch right.

Thankyou for everyones advise, it was muchly appreciated. What I ended up doing is taking it into the shop and told them to get it running which they did.. ended up that even tho we thought we had got rid of all the other drivers from the other card, there must have been something still there that the new one was reading and was conflicting. Once again I thankyou all