White Pop-up Boxes?

[Starlight1101]

Every pop-up box that comes up (Guidebook, Avatar editing, etc.) are plain white so I have no way to use the guidebook to learn to play, look at destinations, etc. What do I do? is it a loading issue or something I can fix?

[Rolig Loon]

That Guidebook is just the beginning.  It's meant as an introduction to the Welcome area, where you learn a very few basic things about SL.  If it's not working properly for you, there are other guides. You have found another guide here, this Answers area. You may come here to ask about whatever puzzles you.   Try to be as specific as you can, because the people who answer here are all residents like you, not professional mind readers.  We've just been in SL for long enough to have asked some of the same questions and learned some good answers.

I can point you to another very good source for a lot of answers, to save you the trouble of coming here twenty times a day.  The Knowledge Base (the tab at the top of this page) contains a large set of articles that are the closest the Linden Lab has come to providing a manual.  Start perusing as topics look interesting to you, and any time you want detailed information.  Then ask us about things that still don't make sense.

Also, find some of the excellent places in world where you can take free courses or tutorials.  Caledon Oxbridge University is one of the best. NCI is another. Use the map in your SL viewer or the Search tools to find your way. It's a good first quest.

Welcome to Second Life.

[Starlight1101]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

That Guidebook is just the beginning.  It's meant as an introduction to the Welcome area, where you learn a very few basic things about SL.  If it's not working properly for you, there are other guides. You have found another guide here, this Answers area. You may come here to ask about whatever puzzles you.   Try to be as specific as you can, because the people who answer here are all residents like you, not professional mind readers.  We've just been in SL for long enough to have asked some of the same questions and learned some good answers.

I can point you to another very good source for a lot of answers, to save you the trouble of coming here twenty times a day.  The Knowledge Base (the tab at the top of this page) contains a large set of articles that are the closest the Linden Lab has come to providing a manual.  Start perusing as topics look interesting to you, and any time you want detailed information.  Then ask us about things that still don't make sense.

Also, find some of the excellent places in world where you can take free courses or tutorials.  Caledon Oxbridge University is one of the best. NCI is another. Use the map in your SL viewer or the Search tools to find your way. It's a good first quest.

Welcome to Second Life.

The issue isn’t necessarily the guidebook but any of those pop up windows such as the guidebook as I mentioned in my comment, is plain white. So any of those windows I am unable to use such as the map, destinations, etc. 

[Rolig Loon]

Just now, Starlight1101 said:

The issue isn’t necessarily the guidebook but any of those pop up windows such as the guidebook as I mentioned in my comment, is plain white. So any of those windows I am unable to use such as the map, destinations, etc. 

Ah, I see. That's very odd.  First of all, the Guidebook is completely different from other popups you will see in SL; it uses a different technology, so it shouldn't fail the same way as any of the others.  In fact, I haven't seen it fail at all. But you say that your map, the Destination Guide, and other windows are also coming up featureless? Hmmmm..

Let me ask you a few questions, then.  What kind of computer are you using? And what viewer are you using while you are in world?  You can tell me some of the information I might need without even logging in. Start up your viewer, so that you get the initial splash page where you enter your name and password, but don't log in.  Just look at the upper left corner of the screen and click the word Help. And then About Second Life.  That will open a window with details about your computer, your connection, and your viewer.  Click the Copy To Clipboard button and then come back here to paste the information into a new post in this thread.

[Starlight1101]

3 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Ah, I see. That's very odd.  First of all, the Guidebook is completely different from other popups you will see in SL; it uses a different technology, so it shouldn't fail the same way as any of the others.  In fact, I haven't seen it fail at all. But you say that your map, the Destination Guide, and other windows are also coming up featureless? Hmmmm..

Let me ask you a few questions, then.  What kind of computer are you using? And what viewer are you using while you are in world?  You can tell me some of the information I might need without even logging in. Start up your viewer, so that you get the initial splash page where you enter your name and password, but don't log in.  Just look at the upper left corner of the screen and click the word Help. And then About Second Life.  That will open a window with details about your computer, your connection, and your viewer.  Click the Copy To Clipboard button and then come back here to paste the information into a new post in this thread.

Second Life Release 6.5.1.566335 (64bit)
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz (1800 MHz)
Memory: 8070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19042.1288)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce MX150/PCIe/SSE2

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 26.21.14.4223
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 442.23

Window size: 1920x1017
Font Size Adjustment: 96pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 128m
Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s
LOD factor: 1.125
Render quality: 5
Advanced Lighting Model: Enabled
Texture memory: 512MB
Disk cache: Max size 204.0 MB (100.0% used)

J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.01.07
Dullahan: 1.12.3.202111032221
  CEF: 91.1.21+g9dd45fe+chromium-91.0.4472.114
  Chromium: 91.0.4472.114
LibVLC Version: 3.0.16
Voice Server Version: Not Connected
January 03 2022 21:41:23

[Rolig Loon]

It looks like you have an entry-level computer that may be having trouble handling the load of SL.  In particular, the GeForce MX150 graphics card is pretty lightweight.  From what I can find quickly on line, "The performance is higher than the old GeForce GTX 950M with GDDR5 memory. Still modern and demanding games only run in low settings and resolutions fluently."  It's based on a chip that has low memory, so may have trouble in demanding graphics environments like SL.  That is, it may not be able to display all of the data that the SL servers will try to throw at it. 

I can suggest a few steps that may help a bit.  While you are still on the startup page, look again at the upper left corner of the screen and click Me >> Preferences.  Click the Graphics tab and look at the slider at the top of the display.  Move it all the way to the left, to LOW.  Then set your Draw Distance to 64m and UNcheck the box for Advanced Lighting.  That will take a lot of the load off your graphic card.  Click the OK button to save those settings and then log i n.  If we are very lucky, things may have improved for you.  You won't have a high powered display, but it may be what your machine can handle.  Later, you can experiment by slowly raising those two sliders to see how much the machine really can handle.

I'm going to leave a note here for @Nalates Urriah, who may see it and come to offer more specific advice.  She is better at handling hardware questions.

Edited January 4, 2022 by Rolig Loon
Additional information

[Rolig Loon]

@Starlight1101 I am about to shut down for the night, now that it's after midnight.  Feel free to add other information. You never know who else may come along tonight.  Good luck.

[Nalates Urriah]

A significant problem is your cache size, 204MB. That is way too small. This is making your viewer  s l o w  1.6Ghz CPU work harder.

Check the properties on the drive where your cache files are. This is usually the main drive unless you changed it. You can search for the how to to check your disk.

Free space is what you are looking for. The images shows I have 410GB left on my main drive. So I can easily set my viewer's caches to 10GB for textures and 10 GB for assets thus using up 20GB of the free 410.

In Firestorm the settings are in Preferences->Network & Files (tab)->Directories (tab). Set both of these at the max for best performance. If you are limited on disk space then the texture cache should be about 5 times bigger than the asset cache. But, no hard rule here. Experiment and see what works best on your machine. I recommend you have 1GB of texture cache as a minimum.

Your graphics memory with the GeForce MX150 is limited to 2GB of onboard GDDR5 memory. It's a nice chip and has an excellent memory configuration. But it  is limited by the amount of memory. So, it is going to do a lot of swapping, which means slow. I may take a couple of minutes for your system to figure out how to fill in those windows.

The CPU and graphics chip suggest you are using a laptop. So, you cannot update the hardware... unless you are actually comfortable replace components on the motherboard. If this is a desktop then there are several possible inexpensive upgrades.

 

[Fritigern Gothly]

15 hours ago, Starlight1101 said:

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 26.21.14.4223
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 442.23

Nobody seems to address the obvious, which is the drivers. You appear to be using the drivers that came with Windows. Bad idea. Those drivers are always out of date and often even incomplete.
Go to https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/drivers/results/184744/ and get the latest drivers for your graphics, the version is 497.29 whereas your driver version appears to be 442.23. This may actually fix your issue.

NOTE: Make sure to check the page for supported cards (I made sure the MX 150 was supported, but always double-check!)