Thanks for the blue screens

Ever since I have downloaded and used the new 1.20+ clients I have received more than 10 blue screens of death in 3 days.

I really do hope you fix this, else I will just have to uninstall SL for good...

Yes, I'm also experiencing BSOD's with the latest version and being that i'm a dj in sl it is becoming very anoying.

Are there any fixes for this availiable please?

Blue screens are a driver issue, not a factor of the software you run. Fix your video drivers.

... and these driver issues have been caused by the new 1.20 release. If I didn't get forced to update, I would not be having these issues. I uninstalled both the drivers AND the software, and reinstalled them, yet I am still getting similar errors.

The issue is that LL decided to screw people over by releasing an update which you HAD to download, and which they knew was not compliant with all graphics cards.

Maybe find a fix before you force people OFF SL...

no problems here at all, so its not the client

I used to have major BSOD issues with the 1.18.xx client back when I started SL... Windlight first look was the solution at the time. I haven't seen a BSOD since. (^_^)

It's a good idea to double check all your drivers, your DirectX update, and probably any firewall/virus scan software you're running. Norton is a serious system killer. (^_^)y

Drivers do not work that way. Best bet is that your driver has some bug that the new viewer manages to find that the old one did not. In which case, it's still a driver problem, not an SL bug: No developer can ever hope to be remotely aware of every driver bug, especially given that the driver vendors obviously weren't aware of it themselves when they shipped it.

If you're absolutely convinced SL did eat your drivers, are you running as Administrator (or equivalent) or as a normal user? If you're running as Administrator, you shot yourself in the foot: You only need Administrator privs to make system-wide changes or add/remove software; using Administrator when you don't need Administrator leaves you open for a misbehaved program to eat a critical part of the system. If you're running as a normal user, the previous paragraph definitely applies 100%: Normal users cannot overwrite system files.

I strongly suspect you're on the right track.



To a degree which I'm willing to go so far as to say that it's not ready for the desktop, and anybody who got suckered into paying for it should demand a refund. It's a bigger system killer than running Windows when there's better alternatives.

I installed the latest version of DirectX, updated my graphics card drivers, updated my graphics card software, and yet I still get blue screens every so often in Second Life.

This has never happened before, so obviously something in the new second life is agrovating the drivers somewhere along the line =/

Have you tried reproducing the problem in the Linux version? That would prove that it's your Windows drivers.

I see that you dont know what the hell youre talking about.

Blue screens are caused directly by drivers---yes. But the driver has to have been asked to do something that will result in that blue screen---and that happens indirectly, by the software in question---in this case the second life viewer.

A blue screen of death has three responsible parties: the driver, the operating system, and the software talking to the driver at the time. If its a blue screen as a result of what's going on with the video or sound driver (since these are always third party), all three constituents are capable of fixing the problem individually.

In this case, microsoft is not going to fix the operating system. There may be a more recent version of the driver that addresses whatever issue is causing it to puke, but any graphics programmer worth their salt will understand what differences between video driver revisions means, and only use ubiquitous calls among them for backwards compatibility, unless it has been expressly shown that not doing so NEVER results in the driver bailing.

Hope this helps.

Software simpleton says: I found my BSODs quit completely with SL when I bought a fan for my laptop to sit on and blow off the extreme heat the graphics card was producing.

It's not a matter of whose fault it is. Because ATI or NVidia aren't going to bend over backwards for Linden Lab, they're too busy getting NEW games running well and NEWER technology running.

Thus it's Linden Lab who has to make the changes/work-arounds for it to work, no matter how much you think otherwise.

It's Linden Lab's problem.

You can try using different drivers, assuming there are any available, sometimes older drivers work better for a particular system than newer ones.

Also you can try some third party viewers such as Cool Viewer or the Nicholaz client.

Also you might search the forums and JIRA for the phrase "blue screen" and for BSOD and for your model of video card and other such things, or use a web search engine, but add "second life" to the query.

You didn't provide any system specs so I can't offer anything specific.

Since 1.21 was released, I've moved on to the Cool Viewer myself. I don't know where I'd be without that "Hide IMs in the console" feature now. (^_^)y

That's only if you're making the mistake of running an operating system whose driver design depends on the vendor instead of the users to produce drivers. Try using Linux instead.

Wrong. Take your linux war elsewhere, moron.

I got a BSOD with the latest viewer and following the information from the screen updated my sound card drivers (Realtek) and haven't had a problem since.... I notice sound card drivers weren't mentioned in the list above?

That was a legit, in-topic suggestion;
you replied by raising the tones, going off-topic and insulting another user.

Talk about "war".


If you think that someone in this forum is a moron, feel free to go to her profile and add her to your Ignore List. That's an awesome feature, isn't it?

Did your mother raise you wrong? If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.

The simple truth is that if you depend on vendors to supply your drivers, you're not likely to get a driver that stands up to use in the real world, even if you are more likely to get a driver that Just Works(tm). If you have the same people developing the driver who are using it, you're more likely to get drivers that just work.

Anybody is welcome to live in a cave on this issue if they want, but that's just not going to change the reality of the situation.

If you updated that driver, then started getting BSODs after that, consider rolling back that driver and see if it stops. It sounds like you have a good start in troubleshooting yourself there.

Maybe things have changed since the last time I tried Linux, but I had to go to ATI and Nvidia to get Linux video drivers that even worked with SL at all.

AMD open sourced the spec for the Radeon chipsets late last year, there has been rapid development of the source code since then.

The nVidia drivers haven't been 100% closed for years now; the source is accessable and you're allowed to modify the code if you submit a patch back to nVidia. Submitted patches has been the primary source of bugfixes in that codebase for years.

My point still stands.

In another life I worked for a major graphics chipset company--- writing graphics drivers.

I'd hardly call that living in a cave. But do go on with your armchair expertise.