SL has become wiregrid for me now.. video woes!

I have an unprecedented problem. I am totally out of ideas. I hope someone can assist.

I am running a HP Pavilion laptop with Windows Vista. The Video Card is of the Intel variety, so, I agree in advance it is not optimal for Second Life, but it HAS worked just fine (albeit a wee bit muddy at times) up until now. Then came the last update of SL, incorporating voice capability (what a curse this has been). It worked fine for about an hour after installation, then I signed out for the evening. The next day, my machine did a windows/HP update (automatically) and may have updated the chipset of the video card (although the installation log doesn't support this notion). In any event, that evening, I logged in to Second Life, and things had drastically changed for me.

Now, I was logging in to SL as usual. but about 2 to 10 minutes afterwards, my client crashed. repeatedly. It seemed to be tied to actions in the client that would tax the video card-- for instance, just turning left (for some reason) would cause a crash if I did it too quickly. Logging back in would cause a replicaiton of the symptoms-- succesful login, can't STAY in. Here are some anomolies to this behavior, to give you a bigger picture:

1) Gradually, if I continue to log back in, the client just crashes immediately after a bit-- the world doesn't even rez.

2) The above behavior occurs with my main (administrator) account. Oddly enough, Vista behaves itself with a GUEST account. I have stayed logged in for about 12 minutes at a time with a GUEST account, which is at least long enough to have decent conversation.
Compare that to 'immediate crash' behavior of the ADMIN account, and it's like heaven.

So that's the problem.. let me tell you what I've done to mitigate it before I came here.

Naturally, I've cleared cache. I've deinstalled and reinstalled. I've deinstalled and reinstalled older client versions (which surprisingly, give me the same sort of behavior).

Naturally, I've submitted a ticket. I've updated it several times. And Naturally, I've nothing back from the Lindens.

The only way I can stay inworld now is to go to wireframe view.. which, I assure you, is not much fun. I have a very active inworld second life and I am missing a lot of events now

So.. I'm hoping there's a workaround, cheat, or some other sneaky way to fix this thing. Does anyone have any ideas? They would be greatly appreciated.

I too have the Intel chipset, and not much memory, and was crashing (on XP tho). Here's the set of things I did to fix it. The items with an asterisk were necessary to avoid crashing, the rest just made it run faster.

** Set SL to NOT run in a window (graphics tab, checkbox). Running fullscreen is easier on your graphics card. Then be sure the chosen resolution matches your actual Windows display settings. This helped me a lot.

** In network tab, be sure your max network bandwidth is well within your actual link speed. If you flood your PC with textures, it will stall.

-- In advanced graphics tab:
** Set graphics memory to lower than SL does ... I have it at 32MB. This one is important.
-- Set particle limit lower, i have at 1024
-- Set outfit composite limit lower, i have at 4

-- In general tab, disable online friend notifications (these little popups seemed to stress my chipset)

-- In graphics detail tab, lower sliders for items that you don't care that much about (I have tree resolution and flexi set really low)

** On PC, make sure your antivirus is not invasive. Both Norton and McAfee have to simply be disabled while running SL. I use AVG now, no particular config settings, seems OK.

** Make sure your graphics drivers are relatively recent (see Intel website). They have been continuously working on their OpenGL implementation.

Good luck!

thank you, i am having this problum aswell.

This is probably the best advice I've had in a while. I will try it tonight. Thanks so much for your kind assistance.

H.

yvw, let us know if any of it works for you!

Alas, not 100% ... I still crashed, but switching to GUEST (from Admin) it crashed much less than it did before-- I was on for 20-30 minutes at a time without serious crashing. Lesson: there might be something in the ADMIN account that is causing extra graphical or CPU load.. ? In any event your suggestion did serve to mitigate some of the problem, for which, thank you!

I even flew a big, absurdly prim-heavy Cubey Terra DH2 around Caledon, crossing several sim borders several times at speed, and did NOT crash out even once.. (http://hiberniaskids.blogspot.com/2007/08/cause-to-have-glimmer-of-optimism.html)

My next big hurdle will be to fight in the new Caledon Academy of Arms (http://hiberniaskids.blogspot.com/2007/08/loch-avie-combat-academy.html) without crashing. Since that will require a lot of movement and side to side motion, I suspect I will be stressing the card quite a bit.

Thanks again...

H.

Yvw! I was going to buy land in beautiful Caledon, before I noticed that it rarely rezzed fully for me and sometimes crashed my teeny laptop. The killer was when I went to Vic City to reserve a plot and couldn't find the Guvnah's Mansion because everything was gray! It's the ultimate graphics workout ... if you can spend any appreciable time there, you will be fine in the rest of SL!

Laptops + Vista + Unsupported GC (optimal suggests compatibility, Inel GC do not support OpenGL standards required by SL).. all = HEAT overload.