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Best viewer for me to use


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Hello Everyone, I was wondering if someone could help me choose the best viewer for me to run SL on.

I am using Firestorm at the moment, and I lag a lot. =/ This is my system's specifications:

CPU: Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU       T4200  @ 2.00GHz (1995.01 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit Service Pack 2 (Build 6002)
Graphics Card Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Graphics Card: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.93.10-111208a-130017E-ATI
OpenGL Version: 3.3.11400 Compatibility Profile Context
It's a laptop, and it's not a strong one as you can see. Can't afford a desktop right now, unfortunately. I've thought of using Phoenix, but I'd like to hear your advice. Thank you!

 

PS:. Imprudence would be good, i know. But Imprudence doesn't see mesh, and i want to be able to see mesh. So that's one viewer that I wouldn't feel good on

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Imprudence is old and even when they would start to work on it again, it woudl take many months to get it back on track with all the changes that viewers have been through. So I would forgett this one for now.

When people have problems however with their computers being unable to run a viewer like Firestorm (that I use myself and consider to be a 'heavy' viewer since it does need ressources and processing ower to run smoothly) I point them towards Cool Viewer as this one behaves much better on weaker machines. I used it on a laptop and while it wasn't anything great, it still worked fine (I had ot reduce grafics significantly but that was my laptops fault).

If you have been using v.1-like viewers so far, then Cool has the added benefit (if oyu see it as a benefit of course as I for example like the v.3-look a lot) of looking like one and still having all the improvments of the later viewers including mesh (it was the first v.1-like viewer to have mesh compatibility).

 

But there are many viewers to choose from so you can always do some testing to see what viewer will your laptop like best.

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What viewer are you currently using, and why do you want to change? The best really is a matter not only of your hardware specs, but also your personal preferences.I have compared many, many viewers, and my personal favorite is either Neirans or Firestorm. My hardware specs are only slightly slower than yours.

I tried Cool viewer, as the previous poster suggested. Not my cup of tea. I guess now that I have experienced FUI viewers, I just can't go back. Besides, performance isn't much better on my machine than when i use FS or Neirans.

Now, since i prefer viewers that are admittedly resource heavy, I tried a couple of things within my OS and my hardware  to boost performance. I recommend that you keep your resource monitor running in the background, so that during lag spikes you can see where your problems lie. Try to keep your RAM use under 75%. If it's any higher, go to the website of whoever manufactured your computer, get the model number, and look at stock ram vs maximum. Running Win7 with all the other programs I tend to open at the same time as I'm on SL, I was using about 3.5 gigs of ram. Upgrading my computer from 4 to 6 gigs helped a bt. My main issue, and I suspect yours too, is that laptop graphics chipsets don't hold a candle to the graphics cards of a desktop. So, nomatter which viewer you use, turning down the graphics quality slider will work wonders to reduce lag. So will routine mainenance of your machine.

Download and run CCC cleaner. This will fix any registery errors, any conflicts, etc. It will clean up unused and obsolete files. It will reduce processes running in the background.

Defrag

Keep all your drivers up to date.

Windows as it comes stock, is a resource hog. This can be easily fixed though. Do away with any fancy themes, pointers, shading, etc. Uncheck anything that animates icons or cursors. This helps more than most people realize. Also, uninstall (Don't just delete, actually uninstall) any of the junkware that comes with the computer from the factory. There is a utility within CCC cleaner to help you do this, or you can use control panel-add/remove programs. Use task manager to kill unwanted/unneeded processes.

Use your resource monitor to determine your "disk usage" This isn't how much filespace you used. This is how much of the information from your disk is begin processed. Compare this against network usage. Then use what you're seeing there to determine your cache size. If you're pegging on your disk usage, then your cache is too big. If you're barely using it, then you can probably use a larger cache.

So I din't really tell you which viewer is best. I told you my two favorites. But I hope what I wrote will enable you to pick a viewer for yourself, instead of for your hardware.

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