How to trouble shoot crashes?

Ok, folks I give…

I need a little help. I am getting soooo tired of crashes…

I get one every 30-45 mins (sometimes I might go one hour) but they can happen at the most inopportune times

I’ve tried two different PCs one running XP and the other Vista 64. They both have fairly high powered NVIDIA cards( GeForce 7600 and 7800) with the latest drivers installed. In the XP machine the crashes are the kind where you end up talking to yourself a while and only realize you crashed when you try to move or look something up… In the Vista machine I get those as well but in addition once in a while the Graphics Card Driver crashes.

Is there a way to troubleshoot these?

Thanks for any pointers!

Derbor

that sounds like a packet loss issue, so you become disconnected from SL but your computer is still waiting for information.

Any message at crash? How much system memory do you have?

I get "mangled network data" crashes periodically even with a beefy system (C2D E6700/2G ram/8800GTX), and after running a traceroute found out I have an issue where my ISP gets 50-70% packet loss at one hop. Its not consistent and comes and goes, so I may have to call Comcast to ask about it.

Other than that though, I get few crashes and normally little lag, even living in a mainland sim with a 15,000 m2 public sandbox & 5-25 users there around the clock. (Making weird rockets & bombs and things that go bang. 99.99% of the time though, they are not a problem ... every now and then some over energetic pup starts target practice using the local neighborhood houses.)

I don't see regular packet loss... most of the time I look in statistics it is zero... there may be a quick burst that sends me bouncing, but don;t know how to look for those..

As far as Memory: I have 4 GB of RAM in both systems.... (I know the XP system can only see 3GB )

Thanks Again..

Der

Me is envious about ram. seriously though, my far from killer rig (single core Athalon XP 2700+) works flawlessly. I didn't even ave any issues during this latest crises

and that's with an Nvidea 6200 OC'd with extra pipes enabled via Rivatuner, and 2 gigs ram.

Do you get any message or all, or a silent crash to desktop? I usually don't get CTDs but have gotten a couple for the first time, only over the last 48 hours. For now I am racking it up as caused by other issues in SL, and won't worry unless they continue once SL is running smoothly.

I would also check on how hot your video & cpu are getting, preferably while IN second life after about 20 minutes and BEFORE a crash. I take it from the 4Gigs memory that this is a desktop PC? Is it unusally warm, the room you are in? Or recent weather?

Also, XFire has a tendency to crash certain programs. I believe I have heard SL mentionned as one such program that conflucts with XFire, so you might turn off XFire especially (and really, everything else) before running the program. Also hopefully you do not have Nortons ^_^

I don't know if SL uses codecs at all, but in other games that had audio-related crashes (Oblivion had this issue a lot), using the K-Lite Codec Pack solved a ton of crashes, especially if you happen to use Nero and other programs that add occasionally glitchy codecs to the system.

No messages at all... only when thre is a drivr crash on the vista system I get a message indicating theat the driver crashed... this one is probably a driver issue with tthe 64 Bit driver.. the other crashes are just like the client loosing connection with the server... no messages or clue as what happened..

THanks for trying to help...

Derbor

It's harder to try with Vista 64-bit drivers, since you don't have a lot of options there, but some people find that rolling back to an earlier version of a driver helps. It might be worth a try on the WinXP system.

Also, I myself never run all the extra files (control panels etc) that nvidia/radeon tend to bundle up, just the basic driver and I turn off from startup some of the extra stuff.

Sometimes also, drivers can get corrupted and need a complete uninstall/reinstall. Sometimes using the free version of drivercleaner pro to clean out all remnants of the driver before reinstalling, can help.

Also again, check the temperatures. You might possibly also have a PSU issue, especially if these cards were later added to systems with weaker power supplies, or if the computer mker cut some corners on the PSU.

Thanks to those who tried to help... (particularly Brash Z.) - I appreciate it...