"Detecting Hardware" ? Is this needed.

Is it necessary for the program (when run) to go through the "Detecting Hardware"
phase before the program opens ?

It would seem that once the program is installed and run once, your hardware
setup should be noted and saved somehow/where - or an option to manually update it.

It takes time when I have to close SL / then click on the icon and get
"Detecting Hardware" for the next 2 minutes... (yes, I know it's not a long time).

I constantly see residents log off and then back on again within 15-20 seconds...
So am I missing something where-as this step can be skipped ?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

It might be helpful to mention what kind of hardware you have? I never see that for more that 1/2 a second at startup. Do you have a very old/slow computer?

Thanks.
I thought that the slowness might be on my end (even though this computer
runs everything fast)

Windows XP Professional Build 5.1
Intel Pentium 4 / 2.80 GHz
766 MB RAM
P4VP-MX board

video -
GeForce FX 5200
128MB memory (video card)

Everything loads and plays fast (games, progs, etc)
But this "Detecting Hardware" phase with SL is very slow.

And necessary to have this done each time the program is run ?
Most programs do it once when they are installed because it is rare
that any hardware will change between each run

update : (may be the problem ?)

I have 3 80 gig drives in this machine..
The game and all folders for it (and gamecache, etc) are not on the
main C drive.
While some of the game is automatically stored in
C:\Documents and Settings\*removed*\Application Data\SecondLife
by default.
So perhaps the slowness is from the two drives exchanging info.

I clocked it now at 2 min 45 seconds from icon to being able to log in.

Thanks for the suggestions - I still say this step should be skipped when the
program starts

There's a tickbox in Prefs for "Detect Hardware at Startup" or something.

Hmmm - can't see it now. Was it taken away?

Anyway, could it be something on your computer needing to know a bit of light probing for SL is ok?

its mostly setting what checkboxes are available in the settings and how far to the right your "gfx card memory" slider will be able to go.

Find the shortcut to SecondLife that you usually use. Right-click it, and select "Properties". In the tab labeled "Shortcut" there should be an input box labeled "Target:". It should look something like this:

"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -set SystemLanguage en-us

Change it to look more like this (-noprobe is the flag you need, -multiple is just another nice one I like to use to run several instances of SL at once):

"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -set SystemLanguage en-us -noprobe -multiple

Oh, and if you're using the Dazzle RC client, it'll have --settings and --channel flags instead, leave those alone and just add the -noprobe -multiple to the end of the list as with the standard client. Will probably look something like this:

"C:\Program Files\SecondLifeReleaseCandidate\SecondLifeReleaseCandidate.exe" --settings settings_releasecandidate.xml --channel "Second Life Release Candidate" -multiple -noprobe

Hope that helps. :-)

There's a Debug Setting for NoHardwareProbe.

Thank You - big help and now the hardware detection portion is skipped.

Cheers !
Demon Nostram