Can hair cause crashes?

I bought a hair pack from a reputable place, and whenever I wear it, I seem to constantly crash. I can't go more than a few minutes without crashing. This is on my Vista laptop with an unsupported graphics card, so naturally the SL experience isn't problem-free to begin with and it's kind of hard to tell if it's the hair or something else causing the crashes. So I wanted to ask more experienced people if hair can even cause crashes? Thanks for your help.

Other than my prim hair ending up between my ass cheeks on some region crossings, I've never had any issues which lead me to suspect it's the cause of the rare crashes I do encounter. Vista + unsupported graphics hardware is a crash looking for a place to happen though.

Prim hair (yours but also other people's) means there are more prims for your client to render. It is possible that your hair is the final blow that crashes you. Does your particular hair have a very high prim count? It is theoretically possible that is overloading your system.

Is there a way to check how many prims it has? I'm still pretty new at this, sorry. All I can tell you about it right now is that it's a medium-length curly style.

I have found that if hair gets clogged in the PSU fan, that can cause crashes.

Right-click on it when you're wearing it, and choose Edit from the pie-menu.
About 1/3 way down the edit menu on the left it'll tell you how many prims the object is using.

If the Edit window doesn't come up properly for you, check that the Tools menu "Select Only My Objects" option is unchecked (no 'x' beside it).

Damn painful too.

A guy I know has hair with something like 180 prims. He has to tp bald when grid use is heavy. And take his high-prim boots off too. He tells me that tp'ing naked is lightning fast - but I'm not sure whether I believe him or not. ;D

the hair i wear every day has 136 prims half of which have an alpha channel and i hardly ever have problems with tp's and it only goes up my ass once a month.

Now with that visual, I'm gonna have to start therapy again !!

Thanks, it has 67 prims.

I'm currently trying it out on my Mac desktop to see what happens.

Prim hair is a known villian for causing people issues. Yes the prim count is one possible cause but it's the shapes used in the hair that can cause you more problems than anything. Twisted, tortured torii are well known crashers when there are a few of them.

The torus shape is the most complicated of the SL build library of shapes and as such take far more resources to draw even simpler ones than most other shapes. Adding to that the twisting and torturing, you have a recipe for crashing, especially if you are already running with a not so stable system. As someone said before, it very well may be the hair tipping you over the edge.

~B

Alright, thanks a lot for your advice.

One more thing, sorry...is flexi hair better than prim hair in this regard? Is there a difference at all?

You swine Kelly! Have you *any* idea how long it took us to get AWM to go into the same room as his computer last time?!?

Awww shame. I am sorry. Get him to meet me in-world and I'll give him a nice massage. I mean a proper one. Not one of those you get in some dimly-li.... oh lord I'm just burying myself deeper now aren't I?

With the current client version, everything can cause a crash. Putting on a prim attachment, walking through very prim-heavy areas, saving a script or opening an inventory folder. I get thrown back to the desktop 5-10 times per day. The current SL client is also the only appliaction that ever managed to completely freeze Windows XP or to produce a bluescreen crash.

Yes I now feel like I am not alone.

The Ice cream truck passed yesterday. SL crashed. So I went out for ice cream.

That wasn't just an ice cream truck. That was a ploy to get you off SL so we'd have less lag.

*Deploys more trucks*

Flei prims are just prims... with one more property for your client to render. So (provided the flexi is the only difference) flexi prim hair will be harder on your system than non-flexi prim hair.

However you can control with how much detail your client renders shape and flexi properties. Try going into preferences (ctrl-p), graphics detail. Near the bottom of the dialogue you will see two slides. Drag them both all the way to the left. You'll notice things look more 'boxy' now, and flexi items move more slowly. Now (preferably after relogging) go about your business as usual. You may notice a difference in performance and crash rate. If so, play around with the controls to compromise between pretty visuals and performance.

For years I played this game with a 100' keyboard extension lead, so I could play and sit out doors in the garden... then came these new fangled things... wireless laptops!! Isn't technology wonderful? It beats dragging the 47" widescreen LCD screen to the edge of the room so I could see the screen... just as well I don't live on the 12th floor of an appartment block.. would have had to use binoculars

It said Mr Softee on it. *Thinks. It could have been my ex I guess.......*

You know they make little blue pills for that now.

All I wanted was 4 minutes...not 4 hours.