Can I get my laptop to run SL better?

This is what I have now:
Toshiba Satellite M45-S165
Intel Celeron M 705 1500Mhz
75 GB HD
512 MB SDRAM
ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M
Windows XP Svc Pack2


Is there anything (aside from getting a new computer) that I can do to it to make it run better/faster in SL?

As much as I hate to say it probably not. SL hates all ATI mobilty cards and I know that replacing an ATI card in a laptop with a Nvidia card is almost next to impossible.

I have a laptop with an older ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 chipset but better other specs and it does OK. It has a 2 GHz CPU with 2 GBs of RAM. The performance it gets is quite similar to that of my desktop which has an ATI Radeon 9800 and a 3 GHz CPU. I suspect any problems you are having could be due more to a lack of CPU and RAM.

But, I do have one suggestion which is, of course, try at your own risk, and only if you know what you are doing. I have upgraded my laptop's video drivers from the standard ones that came with it to 3rd party ones called Omega Drivers. This got me a noticable performance boost in SL. I would recommend that you give them a try if you know how to install video drivers. Here is the web site you can find them on:

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

It's not almost next to impossible.

It is impossible. Unless you have one of the Alienware laptops with an actual video card socket, there is no way to upgrade your GPU.

You ARE totally right on about the ATI mobility chip. It works well, but just not for OpenGL applications.

Upgrade your RAM to 1 GB or higher. That way, you'll get decent performance.

Thank you all for your responses.

Looks like I'll be increasing my RAM and looking at the Omega drivers. Anyone else have opinions about the Omegas?

Print Out n try this. (My "layman's terms" of a portion of a help notecard)

SL takes up some serious video memory, here's what you do. Should fix the problem.
============================================
Click the "Preferences" button before you even log in. It should be at the bottom on the pre-game screen.

GENERAL TAB

Login Location:
Choose My Last Location

Show Names:
Click "Small Avatar Names".

Color For My Effects:
Ignore it, or pick your favorite color.

Away Timeout:
Set it whereever, I usually put it around 300 seconds.

Print Online Notifications:
If you wanna see when your friend come online leave it on, otherwise cut it off.

Rotate Mini-Map:
Cut it off.

Notify when money (L$) spent or received:
Leave it on.

Automatically report crashes:
Leave it Disabled.

Auto-detect graphics hardware on next startup:
Leave it turned off.

Reset Dialogs:
Some "nagging" dialog boxes will have a checkbox which says "Show this next time". After a while, we tend to have those all turned off. If, for some reason, you want to reset them so they come back, click this button.


INPUT/CAMERA TAB

Mouse Sensitivity:
Leave it just the way it is.

Invert Mouse:
Leave it off.

Auto Fly:
Leave it on. That way when you hold Pg Up or Page Down on your keyboard, you will either fly upward, or down. When you hit the ground, you will go back to standing.

Camera Options:
This affects how closely the camera tracks you as you fly or walk around. A higher value means the camera will feel "looser" in tracking your position. I usually set this to 10.

Automatic Edit Camera Movement:
Leave it off.

Automatic Appearance Camera Movement:
Leave it ON.

NETWORK TAB (REAL important as far as PC SPEED)

Maximum Bandwidth:
This slider lets you specify how fast the world should stream data to you.
Set it to 300. If you wanna try n go higher another time, you can switch it up to 500 or somethin.

Disk Cache Size:

While usually larger is usually better, a larger cache also degrades CPU performance because it takes longer to look through a larger cache. I keep this set to 200MB as a compromise between lookup speed and download speed. If you have a slower computer, you might wanna set this higher.


GRAPHICS TAB:

Anisotropic Filtering:
This option improves the subtle appearance of jaggy edges. I have this off.

Local Lighting:
This makes light sources cast light onto everything near them. This can really degrade performance if there are a lot of light sources in your view. I have this off.

Shadows:
This adds a subtle shadow effect on ground surfaces cast opposite the direction of the sun. I turn this on sometimes. It doesn't seem to have too bad of an effect on performance.

Disable Far Clip:
I'm not sure what this does *exactly*, but checking this seems to extend your view distance, which will result in more objects being displayed and lower performance. I have it unchecked now.

Shiny Objects:
Leave it off.

Avatar Rendering:
Unclick the checkbox (I forget what its called, ASP or somethin)
And click the top option for simple Avatars. No bumpmapping, no shiny or whatever.

Terrain Detail:
Turn it to "Low".

Gamma:
This adjusts the darkness of your view. Turning it up will make things darker, turning it down will make things lighter. I have mine set to 1.00

Nighttime Brightness:
It lets you adjust how dark it gets at night. Nothin to do w/ speed so far as I know. I got it on uh...3 or somethin

Display resolution:
Unclick "Run In A Window". It's a lot faster.

Fullscreen Aspect Ratio:
(From SL Forums I'm guessing this is probably for people who have non-standard proportioned monitors (not 4:3) to use as an override. If you have an unusual monitor and things seem "squished" or "fattened" to you, you can probably adjust this to get the proportions a little more normal. Most people should be just fine leaving this setting at 1.333 with 'Auto detect' on.

ADV. GRAPHICS TAB

AGP Graphics Acceleration:
Leave it off unless you know u got an AGP Graphics Card. Makes a BIG DIFFERENCE IN SPEED.

Video Card Memory:
Bwai, set this shit to 16 bit like Sega Genesis. It will still look good, but it's a LOT faster than higher settings.

Object Detail:
Keep this Low, almost all the way down.

Tree Detail:
Keep it all the way down.

Avatar Detail:
Leave it around the middle. This decides how much detail you will see in OTHER folks Avatars, yours will still look about as detailed. I got this kinda low, which is why in my screenshots, I look better than the other avs. [/i]Lower means better speed[/i]

Avatar Vertex Program:
I'm not exacty sure what this does. This option should usually be enabled unless you see problems with avatar postures (twisting or bending into unnatural shapes).

Show Avatar in Mouselook:
Leave it off.

Draw Distance:
Since you runnin slow, turn it all the way down to 64m or whatever.

Fog Distance Ratio:
Put it on 1.0

Max Particle Count:
Set this low as possible without puttin it on zero.

Outfit Composite Limit:
Set it to 1.

AUDIO/VIDEO TAB

Mute Audio:
Click if you dont wanna hear sounds.

Play Streaming Music When Available:
Land owners have the ability to specify a shoutcast/icecast type of stream on their parcels, which will play automatically when you enter their land if you have this enabled. This stream is sent directly to you from the shoutcast server and does not pass through Second Life's system.

Play Streaming Video When Available:
Checking this allows you play streaming video when it's available on a parcel.

System, Wind, Footsteps, UI Volume:
These are regular volume sliders that adjust the volume of their respective sound sources. I have mine set to roughly 100%, 50%, 10%, and 50%.

$ Change Threshold:
This will play a sound if you spend or recieve money, if it is greater or equal to the amount you specify here. I have mine set to 50, which I think might be the default.

Health Change Threshold:
Like the $ Change Threshold, this will play a sound if you take more than 10 points of damage in a damage-enabled area.

Doppler Effect:
Turn it pretty low.

Distance Factor:
Once again, turn it pretty low.

Rolloff Factor:
Turn it off. JUST TURN IT OFF!!!

Default Upload Bitrate:
When you upload a sound file, this will be the default quality setting (sort of like the quality setting on an MP3). A bigger number means higher quality sound, but also it will mean a longer delay when you first play the sound to people who don't have it cached.


CHAT/IM TAB

Chat Font Size:
Set it to small.

Chat Color:
Leave the colors alone. Dont touch em.

Fade Chat After:
Put it on 15.

Note: You can always open your chat history window with Ctrl+H which shows the text in a scrollable window without fading.

Busy Mode Response:
This is a message to send to people who try to IM you while you are set in (BUSY) mode, which you can select under the 'World' Menu.

Chat uses full screen width:
Turn it the fuck off.

Close chat after hitting return:
Leave it. When u wanna close the chat window at the bottom of the screen hit ENTER, to open it back up and speak hit ENTER again.


Arrow keys move avatar when chatting:
If this is enabled, then you will not be able to use your arrow keys to move your cursor around and edit the text in your chat text entry box, instead it will cause your avatar to move. This may be preferable if you have "Close chat after hitting return" unchecked, but you will probably want it turned off if you have "Close chat after hitting return" enabled so that you can easily move your cursor to edit your text. I have this off.

Show chat bubbles:
Cut it off. It slows down the pc some.

Send IM to E-mail:
This will just send u a short E-Mail notification if you get an IM or somethin while u offline.

Include IM in Chat History:
Leave it off..IF YOU KNOW WHATS GOOD FOR YA

POPUPS TAB

I left this whole section the way it was, seems to be workin good.

Thanks Xio. Great info. I'll give it a try!

i installed the Omega drivers and it actually drastically reduced performance on my system.

Well....I reset preferences as outlined above (thanks again Xio) and logged in briefly earlier today and I have to say that it seemed like it was much faster. I'll check it out more tonight/tomorrow. I think I am still going to look at getting at least 1GB of RAM though.

I've never been a fan of celerons... I cant see that helping you any. I personally wouldn't recommend upgrading a celeron computer, but that's just me

Well I do agree...my next computer will not be a celeron....but I'm not quite prepared to get a new computer yet so I'm trying to work with what I have at the moment.

You should find 1Gb RAM makes SL just so much faster - I did

I am running SL on my HP Pavilion Laptop, it use to run very slow until I changed my hard drive from a 4200rpm to 7200rpm. Now it runs much faster and I have no problem with SL

Mia

Most of the suggestions are good, in my experience. Celerons are never easy, but I got SL running at about 7-10fps on the client side on a Celeron 1.4 with 512 megs ram, 128 draw distance, with shiny and ripply enabled. Granted, not exactly a smooth, stunning experience, but decent.

If you're on a Celeron (and since Second Life is more CPU than GPU intensive), you may also want to cut your draw distance from 128 to 96 or even 64 meters.

Regards,

-Flip

Thanks everyone. I keep tweaking my setting based on your recommendations and it does seem to be running quite a bit better. My next step is to upgrade my RAM.

Xio .. genius .. thanks so much! ... followed a lot of your settings and my useless laptop has just increased the fps so much its amazing! ... I can actually build now with out having problems when dragging objects .. lol ...

thanks a lot!

adec

I use Omega drivers and I LOVE them. On my crappy expensive Alienware (never buy Alienware!), it did make a huge difference in performance for me.

"You're very welcome", 2 anybody who needed help

I've ordered a new computer largely so SL will perform better. I have been running it on a Mac G4 Powerbook at 1.33 with a 64MB Radeon video card. I upgraded the memory from 512MB to 1GB and got a modest improvement, but not as much as I'd hoped.

The new machine, a Windows XP PC, will have a 2 GHz processor and a 256 MB Nvidia graphics card. It also will have 1GB RAM. My question is, if I still have time to change the order, would boosting RAM to 2 GB make any appreciable difference, enough to justify the cost, or is 1 GB in conjuntion with the other upgrades enough?

In my case, money is an object, so I don't want to do it unless it will make a real difference.

I find 1Gb quite adequate. It made a huge improvement over 512Mb. Another gig should make it faster still but something about diminishing returns, some law or other, it might be questionable whether it's worth that extra hike.
Wonderful thing about PC is you can leave it for now and if you find you *need* that extra hike later when funds allow .. fine

Yes, I concur.

I hope the implications of this are apparent to all ?