Major lag issues

[Rolig Loon]

It sounds as if you have taken a good, scientific approach to the problem.  Lag can be a bear.  Each of the steps you have taken is exactly what anyone here would have suggested too.  Let me suggest a few others that are less obvious.

1. Get completely off wireless, if you have been on it.  If you are on a campus network, you can be losing bandwidth to everyone else in the dorm.

2. If you ARE on a campus network, your access may be throttled by campus IT to keep you from overusing network resources that other people need for ..... um ... studying.

3. Some antivirus routines insist on scanning every single file that is downloaded to your computer.  Norton is particularly picky.  When you wander around in SL, every new texture you see is being downloaded to your cache and is potentially being checked on the way.  That can create incredible lag.  Whitelist SL in your Av program.

4. You may have other programs running on your machine that are using CPU time or doing a lot of disk access.  My own FPS drops like a stone at noon every day while my AV program downloads its daily updates and does a system scan.  Microsoft's forced downloads do the same thing.

Take a look at other possibilities here and here.

[Rolig Loon]

It sounds as if you have taken a good, scientific approach to the problem.  Lag can be a bear.  Each of the steps you have taken is exactly what anyone here would have suggested too.  Let me suggest a few others that are less obvious.

1. Get completely off wireless, if you have been on it.  If you are on a campus network, you can be losing bandwidth to everyone else in the dorm.

2. If you ARE on a campus network, your access may be throttled by campus IT to keep you from overusing network resources that other people need for ..... um ... studying.

3. Some antivirus routines insist on scanning every single file that is downloaded to your computer.  Norton is particularly picky.  When you wander around in SL, every new texture you see is being downloaded to your cache and is potentially being checked on the way.  That can create incredible lag.  Whitelist SL in your Av program.

4. You may have other programs running on your machine that are using CPU time or doing a lot of disk access.  My own FPS drops like a stone at noon every day while my AV program downloads its daily updates and does a system scan.  Microsoft's forced downloads do the same thing.

Take a look at other possibilities here and here.

[Teagan Tunwarm]

Also check how well your laptop itself is performing. SL can be very hard on laptops. I usually access SL via laptops also and have gone through several since I've been in SL. Running SL on them, I think, caused them to expire much faster than normal For example, my past laptop had a heat fan fail, which made it nearly impossible to run SL and I had to have the fan replaced twice.

Have you tried other viewers? I use Singularity sometimes to give my laptop a break. You may also want to look into getting a laptop cooling pad to keep your machine from getting too hot, since SL is graphically intense and can cause overheating and other problems with extended use (true for desktops too, but laptops just are not as efficient at cooling themselves off as a desktop usually. A decent cooling pad costs between $20-40.