Best viewer and settings for a bad laptop?

[SpookyTheZombieKat]

Hello all, hopefully I'm posting this in the right spot. 
I used to use the Firestorm viewer and the Singularity viewer on my good laptop, however, last year in July my laptop was destroyed. Since then I'm stuck on a crappy refurbished laptop I had to buy from the repair place.
I've tried all viewers I know of. The main viewer, Firestorm and Singularity. Only one version of Singularity works, sort of. 
Everything is still really laggy, I have every setting all the way down. 
The laptop I'm on right now is an HP Probook 6550b. 
Can anyone tell me if there is a viewer that would work better for this kind of laptop? Is there a way to make the settings any lower? 
I'd love to be able to play SL again like I used to. I won't be able to get a new laptop until later this year. 
Any help with this is greatly appreciated.

[Lillith Hapmouche]

The laptop is actually far from crap, it's a very decent business version. Just not meant for anything graphical demanding with that low end AMD card.

Is it still on 2 GB RAM and a 32bit OS? There should be a spare, easy to reach RAM slot to add up to 8 GB. You might actually find a good second-hand offer and then reinstall a 64bit Windows 10 version. Or Linux, if you're fine with that.
Optionally, replace the HDD with a SSD, which you can keep using in a better machine.

As an alternative viewer, perhaps try Henri Beauchamp's Cool Viewer. 

Edited April 24, 2017 by Lillith Hapmouche

[SpookyTheZombieKat]

It was decent at first, but many issues popped up with it and I've tried contacting the guy I bought it from and he never answers back lol
Audio issues, and now I can't even edit or render videos on movie maker without the laptop completely shutting off. 
The repair guy said he'd upgraded it when he refurbished it. It has Windows 10 pro edition, 64bit operating system, 4GB of ram. 
It can run MC decently and I've been able to play WoW quite well on it. 
I don't know how to add upgrades in myself..not a very tech savvy girl. Although I tried to fix my old laptop, didn't work though
I'm actually on the Cool VL viewer right now lol it works pretty good! The layouts a bit weird, but at least it isn't as laggy as Singularity is. Still on the hunt to find a less laggier viewer until I get a new laptop. 

[ChinRey]

On 24.4.2017 at 3:15 AM, SpookyTheZombieKat said:

I'm actually on the Cool VL viewer right now lol it works pretty good!

If you want something lighter than the Cool VL Viewer, Radegast is the answer. Radegast seemed to have died with its creator but recently Cinder Roxley took the initiative to resurrect it and although it'll take a while to get the development back on track after such a long hiatus, it's already an interestign alternative for those who need a low resource, low lag viewer.

[SpookyTheZombieKat]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Radegast is the answer.

Just tried Radegast a while ago...where's the virtual world?  All I saw was a chat box, then I clicked on the 3D view button and it crashed lol

[Klytyna]

6 hours ago, SpookyTheZombieKat said:

Just tried Radegast a while ago...where's the virtual world?  All I saw was a chat box, then I clicked on the 3D view button and it crashed lol

Yeah... People still recommend these old viewer 12 zombies and text apps for "older pc" users, can't imagine why.

Firestorm is the "Feature heavy power users" viewer, or as some cal it "laggy gimmick packed bloatware", not a good choice for older machines at all.

Dr. Frankenviewer's Singularity, yeah least said the better, the non63-bit alpha builds don't have Bento, but are increasingly packed with clumsily crowbared in "features" to turn a viewer 1 zombie into laggy bloatware.

Try Catznip, it's a 32 bit viewer, but if your machine has 'only' 4 gb of ram, the 64bit vs 32 bit thing doesn't matter much anyway.

Catznip runs reasonably well on non Firestorm machines and the UI shouldn't be too alien.

Assuming the machine running a 64 bit OS can handle more than 4 gb, it's probably worth setting up "virtual ram" on the hard disk. Don't let windows do this for you, it's standard trick with virtual ram is a floating on-demand sort of system where apps can crash while waiting for Windows to allocate more disk as ram, So, set a fixed amount, a permanent virtual ram allocation gives the system more memory to play with (albeit much slower than real ram, but faster than no additional ram) so there will be enough ram, real and virtual to run the os, AND allocate ub to 3.5 gb for the 32 bit viewer.. 
 

[SpookyTheZombieKat]

17 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Try Catznip

Catznip wouldn't even work on my laptop. I tried it before I'd made this post, and all that comes up on my laptop is an error message, unfortunately.
Firestorm and Singularity were my favorites on the laptop I had, before it got destroyed and I had to settle with this thing. 
 

[Klytyna]

Just now, SpookyTheZombieKat said:

Catznip wouldn't even work on my laptop. I tried it before I'd made this post, and all that comes up on my laptop is an error message, unfortunately.
Firestorm and Singularity were my favorites on the laptop I had, before it got destroyed and I had to settle with this thing. 

 

Your machine should run Catznip without any problem, what was the error message, it might be that win-10 "drivers out of date" thing, where you need to reinstall the 3rd party drivers because win-10 stomped on them.

Personally, I never downgraded to w10 and don't intend to, 
 

[SpookyTheZombieKat]

Here's the error, but yea, that seems like it is what you said. I never upgraded or downgraded anything on this laptop though, this was how I got it from the guy who refurbished it at the repair shop.