Arksun Tone

The real problem isn't a lack of memory or not being able to address more with a 32-bit OS, the problem is one of memory leakage, that ALL viewers seem to suffer, the memory usage just creeps up and up and up the more locations and textures get loaded, but its the unloading part that fails. It's just bad programming imho, I don't know if thats the viewers fault, the servers, the system as a whole or what. All I do know is, I never had this problem in the past, been on SL for 7 years now.

So I know I know, I'm still using 32-bit XP OS and should really upgrade to 64-bit with more memory, but seriously, is there no fix for the memory overloads with any viewer? I've tried the official SL viewer, Firestorm and Singularity and with all of them, in certain sims with a lot of textures and fx, I watch my system memory usage creep up and up and up till it gets to about 1.4gig and then causes a crash (win XP 32-bit really doesn't like a single application using more than that amount of ram). Is there any way or anything in debug of any of the viewers where I can force set a limit to how much ram is used to at least prevent crashing out completely?

This does sound like an overheating/auto throttling down issue. It being the graphics preferences doesn't make sense if its a higher frame rate to start with and always bounces back up after minimising (again that would go along with a heat issue because when sl is minimised its not taxing the GPU, allowing it time to cool down). As well as the return/fan suggestions, you can also buy specific cooling docks for laptops which dissipate the heat away faster which might help. Good luck!