avalon netizen

[Avalon Netizen]

My laptop works fine until I try to run second life when I have been running on battery power. As soon as I plug the mains plug in the battery / power icons flash constantly like it is going between maims power and battery power.I use Firestorm but have also tried Singularity which is no better. It's an asus G55 vw windows 10. As I say any other apps no problem , just when i start second life.

[Nalates Urriah]

Laptops have their settings tweaked for power saving. The video drivers are especially prone to such tweaks. The result is the laptop will often turn off the NVIDIA chip and use the CPU for graphics rendering to save power. It does that on an app-by-app basis deciding if more graphics power is needed or not.

The G33 came with NVIDIA 660M video chip and a 3rd gen CPU with Intel HD Graphics 4000. To assure you are using the NVIDIA chip and using it in performance mode set up a game profile for Second Life. See: http://blog.nalates.net/2016/06/05/nvidia-settings-2016/

When you drop back to battery only operation the laptop will try to switch to using more power saving options. You have to override those settings when starting SL, which is the purpose of a video game profile. Otherwise, the laptop WILL switch to using the HD Graphics 4000 video built into the CPU. Intel has a video driver problem that cripples SL viewers running on older HD Graphics. The problem is apparent when using 64-bit viewers. So, you may try running a 32-bit viewer when on battery. You can have both 32 & 64-bit installed at the same time.

Edited May 7, 2019 by Nalates Urriah

[Qie Niangao]

I'm not familiar with this particular laptop, but it sure sounds similar to what I've seen when a laptop battery is near to being unable to take a charge anymore. If so, you should be able to see the same effect if you can find another application that works the CPU and graphics as hard as Second Life -- if there even is such an application.

Unless somebody has a more specific suggestion, you might try running your favorite hardware monitoring program to see if anything looks scary. (Like, maybe the weather there is warming up and the fans are drawing more current than before, or something silly like that.)

[Branduff Bisnovat]

Where I live we have battery shops that will test your battery and tell you what's going on with it.  If there's something like that in your area I would check that out.  My only other guess is the Windows battery saving features might be set to something odd.  Don't have much experience with 10 on laptops though.