The current SL viewer screws up my laptop

[Dracona Thor]

I downloaded the most recent viewer to my laptop as I want to activate the adult option, however every time I try it totally screws up.

I get a "cant activate GL rendering context" error and it refuses to open, as does any other programs of this type. Curiously the same error occurs with the latest greenlife emerald viewer. I have to uninstall, turn off laptop, wait 30 secs then turn back on and reinstall earlier versions.

This worries me a lot as soon I may not be able to run SL (when older versions not supported) if an answer can't be found.

Help?

BTW am running XP, fairly recent lappy. 2gig ram

[Dracona Thor]

specs for laptop

Intel Pent 2.00GHz

2.0gig RAM

Windows XP Pro serv pack 2

says monitor is ATI MOBILITY RADEON X300

[Suzanne Piers]

Oh dear... *sigh* I had this problem too, with my old laptop and I am sorry to say, the answer is "a new laptop."

When they upgraded to the 1.23 viewer, the lag was so bad it was like watching a slideshow. Completely unacceptable and I wasn't going to be able to log into SL anymore unless something changed. And what had to change, was my laptop.

One of the problems with laptops, is that things like graphics cards aren't upgradable. And a graphics-intensive program like SL, when they upgrade the software, makes laptops obsolete pretty quickly. My "old" laptop was only 3 years old and was fine for everything else. But my new laptop runs SL like a charm... but it is new. It has 6 mgs of ram and has a quad-core processor. I still have long rezz times on some sims.

Truly, in a perfect world, running SL on a gaming desktop computer is the best way to experience SL at its finest. But if you're like me, and enjoy SL from the comfort of your living room recliner, then a new laptop is probably in order.

Sorry to be the bearer or bad news.

[Jessika Rang]

Dracona there is hope for your laptop, you do not necessarily have to buy a new one... try looking at other viewers especially the legacy viewer from cool viewer here is a link:

http://sldev.free.fr/

or check thru this wiki for other optional viewers:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Alternate_viewers#Third-party_Viewers

I think you should be able to find something that will run well on your laptop as long as it isn't 6 years old like mine lol.

good luck!

 

Message was edited by: Jessika Rang - Oh and these viewers are current with the Adult option... they just dial down graphics, again take a look at the "legacy" version of the Cool Viewer

[Hiro Kutenai]

Hopefully this should help if you don't mind losing the 'ooooowww pretty' graphics. As Jessika Rang put the URL up for the wiki.sl go to that I go to the Cool SL Viewer. I did this for my laptop as I was advised by my partner. You will need to install 2 exe (both on the site) one will be SL version 1.19 so it has what I've been told is graphics before windlight and then you install the cool viewer exe.

I've had to do this because my Laptop is rather old and it's a work laptop which is main only meant to docs and low graphical items and I've had no troubles at all.

Hope this helps you out.

[Dracona Thor]

Do they have the adult option available tho? That's the main reason I wanted the latest version otherwise 1.22 runs fine, plus I was worried about future updates when SL stops supporting 1.22

[Clyde Lindman]

Also you might want to try the Emerald viewer. My SL neighbor had the same problem as you with the standard viewer on her laptop. She installed Emerald and it works fine (Plus it has MANY features missing on the standard viewer).

[Baeric Constantine]

And when the issue occurs using any viewer above 1.22?

[Zardoz Firanelli]

Cool Viewer has the following patch for the ATI Mobility GPU:

 

ATIcrashBug (for v1.20.15 and older only: implemented in v1.21): works around the hardware cursor bug of Mobility Radeon cards running with the ATI fglrx drivers. See the VWR-1320 bug report for full details.

 

It intsalls over top of your existing sl install.

[Clyde Lindman]

So far I have had no problems with my laptop, but Modular Systems offers 2 versions of Emerald: 1 for fast machines and 1 for older machines. Information can be found here: http://modularsystems.sl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3&Itemid=8

[Gwendoline Philbin]

Dracona I am using the 1.22 client and I have access to all adult content, even though I don't really need it . What's the trick? Well if you can manage to start 1.23 (on your laptop of any other machine), you can set the access options for your avatar and thereafter forget 1.23 for ever. The options are set on the LL servers, not on your machine, so when using 1.22 the options remain set.