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So I recently got a brand new laptop. Vastly better than my old one in every spec, and it's shiny to boot. The only thing it can't seem to do is play SL properly. I'll be playing it for all of 10-15 minutes when the screen will lock up, and the window will say (Not Responding.) I've tried adjusting the video quality even though I can handle high without slowdown, but nothing seems to work. My old laptop could run SL perfectly with no crashes at a medium setting, so I can't figure out why this is happening at all. Little help?

My specs are as follows:
TOSHIBA Satellite P745, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40 GHz, 6 GB RAM, Windows 7 64 bit, and an Intel(R) HD Graphics Family video card. 

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The P745 is not a gaming machine. It has only the HD grphics built into the CPU, which is mostly for video streaming. 

That it runs for 10 to 15 minutes is surprising, but suggests a power or heat problem. You need to have the unit plugged into wall power while running SL.

Make sure there is ample air space under the laptop when running.

If you have settings for performance vs power use, select performance.

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Gellion,

I wrote the following to explain my freeze-up solutions to some friends that were also experiencing similar things...

This NC is for everyone who has been installing the latest releases of the SecondLife Viewer [Version 3.3.0 (251182) or later] – Firestorm Viewer [Version 4.0.1.27000 or later] – Phoenix Viewer[Version 1.6.1.1691 or later] and found themselves crashing or freezing up during SecondLife sessions much more frequently. This will also work for previous versions of these viewers according to the blogs I’ve seen researching this problem

At the end of March, 2012, my PC started freezing up minutes into a SecondLife session right after upgrading to the new version of the Phoenix Viewer. These freezes required a forced shutdown. Being a SecondLife DJ this was a pretty frustrating issue. Thinking it was an incompatibility with the previous version of Phoenix, I preformed a clean install of Phoenix per the instructions on their support website. Alas, the problem remained. After uninstalling Phoenix and trying both the current versions of SL and Firestorm the problem continued. I thought my graphics card was dying. My very techie daughter [who is a gaming fanatic and flight avionics programmer] helped me tune up my PC, as well as diagnose the problems with it. Lots if little issues were found and fixed but the graphics card was fine. Just a few years old but performing well and still able to over-clock which was a feature I was not using.

After a complete clean-up of my PC both physically and software-wise, the problem remained with all 3 of these viewers. The solution ended up being simple. It seems that all 3 of these viewers are relying more and more on several Linden Lab graphics functions that are increasingly making use of the following feature…

                          OpenGL VBO [Vertex Buffer Objects]   when a graphics card has this available.

My daughter says that this feature has been undergoing a lot of micro-code changes over the past few years and that earlier implementations of this feature are ‘poorly’ done. Updating to the latest drivers for your graphics card will not fix this since this it firmware not software related. This issue will apply to all PCs with a high-end graphics card or chip-set that have a few years on them. 

The solution below apparently has been published before, however, when it decides to show up as an issue will be dependent on the version of your graphics card VBO implementation and when the viewer starts to use this option more. She told me that March 2012 was my time with a giggle. The new viewers had the use of the advanced hardware graphics options turned on as a default.

Her recommendations to me for my PC/Graphics Card combination were to do the following after any clean install and before logging in the first time on any of the aforementioned viewers. These are the instructions for the Second Life 3.3.0 (251182) Mar 15 2012 11:29:12 (Second Life Release) viewer but they are pretty much valid for the other 2 viewers as well.

1) Find the Graphics section in the Preferences

2) Look for the Hardware button/section and bring it up

3) Uncheck the Filtering: [  ] Anisotropic Filtering option [not related but if you are crashing you can’t afford this anyway]

4) Set the Antialiasing: option to [4x         ] or better [not related but is makes our leg curves much sexier]

5) IMPORTANT: Uncheck the Enable VBO: [  ] Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects

6) Let the Default Texture Memory (MB): slider be the default value

7) Click on the [   OK   ] button

8) and restart the viewer.

I was able to get onto SecondLife and stay on after these changes were applied including running 4 concurrent sessions with the viewer from Linden Lab. The performance increase from recommendations 3 + 4 are a very nice plus.

What’s funny is that I didn’t fool with these options before but needed to at this time. Techie-daughter said that is probably because LL is starting using the VBO feature more with each release when it is found on a graphics card but can’t check for the micro-code level of every graphics card [OK I know some of you will know what this means]. Newer gaming oriented graphics cards have this implemented very well she told me.

I hope this helps.

Can someone from LL add to this if possible?

 

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I am having the same issue and frequent crashes since I switched to LL viewer 3 a couple weeks ago.

I did go through the checklist and made the first 2 recommended changes.

But the VBO was already unchecked on mine. I hope those other 2 will do the trick.

Any more recommendations are always great. Thanks!!

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