How can I get Second Life to work on my computer?

[Bellaabdf]

I want to play "Second Life"  I installed it and It won't let me play it it keeps saying "Second Life is unable to run because your video card drivers did not install properly, are out of date, or are for unsupported hardware."I have ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 running on a DELL Inspiron 8500 with windows xp HOW can I get the game to work I don't have any disk that was used for the video card driver thing

[Cinnamon Lohner]

You don't need a disk.  Go to the AMD/ATI website and download the latest version for your particular graphics card and install it.

--Cinn

[Bellaabdf]

does that mean I have to install both AMD and ATI or can I just have the one I never done this before

the adapter type is ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 so would that be the one i need to update or something

[Rolig Loon]

ATI Video Driver

• Latest driver Last checked Feb 6th- Windows and Linux: 12.1 (Jan 25)

[Peggy Paperdoll]

That's an old video card. Dell's last update for the card that I could find was 2005........I suspect Dell is no longer supporting the card. I did find 9000 series legacy drivers on the AMD/ATI driver update site (by the way, ATI and AMD are the same company now.......AMD bought out ATI a little over a year ago).

 

See if you can find your driver in the legacy archives and download it, then install it after you've uninstalled your present driver.....just follow the Windows prompts to restart when it says. Do not let Windows search or install a driver when it boots back up after you restart to complete the uninstall.....close the pop up and navigate to your downloade file and install. The next restart and you'll be using the new driver.

 

I do have to say that since that card is so old, you may not have much luck with running SL on the official viewer. You will probably have to use one of the TPV's that are designed for low end computers or older computers.

[Nyll Bergbahn]

Unfortunately, you will not be able to run any version of Second Life with your laptop. While the Pentium 4 chipset is ok to run Second Life, the Inspiron 8500 came with two graphics card options, a 32MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 or a 64MB GeForce4 4200 Go. You have the ATI option but neither option would allow you run even the older v1 based Phoenix viewer.

When I started in Second Life many years ago, I used a Pentium 4 powered desktop with an ATI 128MB card to run SL v1 but a 32MB card simply does not have enough memory. By all means try but I think it's an exercise in futility.

If you still want to update your drivers anyway, do not go to the ATI/AMD website as they can only direct you to Dell Support so click this link:

 http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19

EDIT: Just saw Peggy's reply in the Permalink (why can't LL sort this blog out so we can see all replies) where she discovered a legacy driver for your card. However, no matter what driver you install, it cannot alter the fact that the card has insufficient memory to run SL. May be time to buy a new laptop.