Vladi Hazelnut

you are better off taking back into your invetory anyway because of the scripts. But like the others have said, it does not count against your prim count once you take it. As for the sitting on something and the prim count going up I think they fixed that. It used to be if making a 32 prim car and you wanted a passenger you had to leave an extra prim available. I have been told they fixed that, but have not tested it yet.

I am highly skepticle of this. And I assure it is not with shadows on. I would be curious as well to what viewer is being ran in ultra and on what OS those frame rates were. We are talking a 2002 laptop. Video cards have come a long way in the past few years let lone 10 years. And when you are talking a laptop with integrated graphics I don't see it happening. I can get around 120-130 fps using a quad core and a gts 250, if I am like 3000 meters in the air on a platform. If someone is doing this on a 10 year old laptop I might as well toss my computer in the trash. As for the OS's it can be done if you have the hard drive space. But keep in mind windows 7 takes up about 20 gigs. Linux is much less though. And while I love windows 7, I would wonder how well it would run on a 10 year old computer. I would have to see it to believe it. Maybe if it was a revamped desktop, but with a laptop there is not a whole lot you can do to it. Change the hard drive and the ram and that is about it. And I don't even think DDR was out 10 years ago, i would have to research it.

SL testing windows 8? I wouldn't count on it. I am not even sure if half of Lindens computers even have windows 7 on them yet lol. I had problems with a video card like a year ago and contact LL and they told me most of their computers were running with 6600 series cards in them lol. You will probably get more testing and feed back from people doing third party viewers before you will from LL. My guess anyway.

I have the gts 250 as well. I find Kirstens cranked up does put quite a load on your system compared to the sl viewer or firestorm with the same settings. Hisr viewer is specifically geared towards those that shoot video or take pictures. So it does look awesome. Also on cable internet as well with 8mb download speed. From what I understand though sl still only sees 1.5 so setting it higher really doesn't gain you anything. Maybe its different for different people? The newer ati cards seem to work better I guess, and it depends on the computer. Like macs seem to do quite fine with ati. I think its the drivers rather than the card. Also ATI doesn't do as well with open GL and that is what sl uses. At least the older cards anyway. I know when I originally got my GTS 250 I had got an ATI card first and had to take it back, sl wouldn't even run with it. But that was a few years ago. I agree though, for a PC I always suggest someone stick with Nvidia since it seems to work no matter what.

Ya I did a video on that for racing in sl. On how to adjust your viewer and computer to get more out of it. I do the same as you. Actually I have it set up so nothing loads when I start my comptuer, which is another reason I have fast boot up times. The SSD helps, but not starting 15 programs in the background makes a big difference lol. And there is a program called Advanced System Care that has a boost mode that will actually shut off everything for you and change your desktop settings to get more performance. And another one that comes with it called Game Booster that optimizes it even more. This thread did get seriously side tracked, but then the OP never did post his actual specs so there isn't much we can do on that one. SL really depends on various things to run well, some you can control some you can't. If you have a poor internet connection, really high ping or the SL server is running like crap the best computer in the world won't help you. It will still run like crap. As far as sl is concerned though really the best investment you make is a better GPU if everything else is at least half way decent. Its one of the things that actually has the largest impact on the game. I have tested many different configurations with sl and without a doubt the GPU has the biggest impact. And after that from what I found was the operating system. just switching to windows 7 significantly raised my frame rates, as in more than doubled them over xp or vista and linux. If you have at least 2 gigs of ram, a dual core cpu and healthy hard drive upping them really doesn't have much effect on sl. Where it pays off is when trying to multi task while running sl. As in if you are a content creator and are running texturing, 3-d modeling or video software while working in sl. If you are running sl on a system with at least 2 or 3 gigs of ram, dual core processor and integrated graphics my advice would be to get a stand alone video card before you did anything else. A top of the line processor and 16 gigs of ram won't gain you squat compared to a decent stand alone video card. Even if its only a 70 dollar card, if you get the right one. Something to consider though is when step up to the better video cards like a 9800 or similar and up you will probably have to upgrade your power supply as well.

" and enough RAM to not have to use any drive for virtual memory" Like I said in my other post, this will never happen. Windows will always use virtual memory unless you manually shut it off, which most don't suggest. It doesn't matter how much memory you have, windows will always use a paging file, it is just the way its set up. And the more ram you have the larger your page file will be, unless you set it manually.

A little bit more on the life span of a SSD. And SSD doesn't write to the same cell over and over. It spreads the data out over the whole drive and has software that monitors how many times a cell has been written to to keep the wear level even over the whole drive. So in order to wear one out you would have to write X amount of data to the entire drive over and over on a daily basis. Most drives are rated at 5 years life span with X amount of data written to it daily. keep in mind this is continuous writing 24/7 365 days a year. Ratings are anywhere from 20gb to intels 100gb a day. The avarage person writes about 10gb a day, if that and that isn't continous over the whole day. So that means on a drive with a 20gb a day rating you can over write the entire drive with 36,500 gb of data before it begins to fail. With a 100gb rating it would be 182,500gb of data. And I willing to bet this is a conservative number. So based on an average of 10gb average of data you are looking at 10 years of life for a 20gb per day drive and 50 years of life on a 100gb per day rated drive. And remember this is writing to the entire drive in order to wear out all the cells. And the larger the drive the longer it will last since you have to write more data to it to wear it out. So chances are it will fail due to an electronic hardware problem before you ever wear it out by writing to it. And on defragmenting, SSD's keep track of where they write the data to and have no mechanical heads that need to move to find the data. They can virtually instantly access it no matter where it is written to. Flash memory works nothing like a mechanical mangetic drive. SSD's scatter the data all over the drive on purpose in order to make it last longer.

That was the case a few years ago, but the newer drives have a much longer life span. It goes by how many writes they can take before they go bad, and that amount is pretty large for the average user. By the time you wrote to it that much you would need a new computer anyway. And you don't defrag a SSD. My Intel drive is rated at 100GB per day of random writes for 5 years before failing. And there is no way I am coming anywhere near that. And that is most likely a concervative estimate. And even when a SSD does fail, you don't lose any data. It just stops accepting writes, it will still read. So you can still transfer your data to another drive. The biggest draw back is the size vrs price vrs performance. If you are looking at anything larger than a 60gb ssd for what it would cost you could get a mechanical drive that would be pretty fast and way larger. And a good mechanical drive actually has faster write times in most cases. SSD's excell at reads, not writes. But the SSD's have no moving parts, use less power and put out almost no heat and can take a lot more physical abuse. They were really designed for laptops. And again, like I said, my ssd offered me no improvement for sl at all. I use both, I have an SSD and a 7200 rpm mechanical drive. And windows 7 will automatically see a SSD and optimize itself for it.

I just ran a short test too see what would happen on my system with multi tasking. I have ten internet browswer windows opened, not tabbed, seperate windows. Gimp with 10 textures opened, blender, fraps and SL/firestorm running in ultra. And on top of that I opened windows movie maker and started processing a video file at the same time. As you can see I am only using around 60 percent of my memory and I am still pulling almost 100 frames per second in sl. And this is with 4 gigs of DDR2 installed. I can personally think of better ways to spend money than on 12 to 16 gigs of ram. For that kind of money you could get a 60 gig SSD drive, a really good SATA drive or depending on what you have for a processor a better one. And if you were running on integrated graphics it would get you a pretty decent stand alone video card.

That in no way implies that you need that much. Windows 7 manages ram differently depending on how much you have. And you can put as much ram as you can in a computer and windows 7, and I believe vista will still use a paging file, its just how they work. Many think "wow I can put 12 gigs of ram in my computer and it will never use my hard drive.". Wrong, it will still do it. Pull half your ram out and see what happens. I bet you will notice no difference at all in how your system runs. Well you will notice one thing, it will use less power. The more ram you have the more power your computer will consume. So when thinking of people using a laptop, using less ram will actually give you more battery time. A computer is a whole complex system, its rarely one item that will suddenly you make you perform better. For games the best power boost is a better GPU, but that is not the case with other things. Things to consider are the speed of your cpu, the amount of ram and ram speed it will actually support, the amount of cache and speed. Then there is the main board its self and what amounts and speeds it will support. Then there is your hard drive, how big it is, what the disk speed is, the amount of cache it has and its read, write and seek times. Faster ram with tighter timing would actually be better performance wise than the amount. But putting the best and most ram you can find in your system will do you no good if something else is sub pare. Like say you have an older cpu or a huge fragmented hard drive, or one with slow specs. You want to see your comptuer speed up, drop a SSD in it for you OS. My computer boots in under 30 seconds. However it really made no improvement on how sl runs. It launches faster, but it doesn't run any faster. Ram is usually the last spec I consider in a system as long as it has around 3 gigs. One of the main reasons to go with 4 gigs is you can run it dual channel and double the speed. Its not the extra ram helping, its the way it accesses it. Even your operating system makes a difference, especially where sl is concerned. I have tried sl on XP, vista, linux and windows 7. Windows 7 always gives me the best performance. I was actually not impressed at all with linux, but then I am not a programmer.

I can think of absolutely no games that require 4 gigs of ram to run them. More ram has to do with multi tasking than running any one single application. There have even been several tech articles stating that most have no need for more than 4 gigs of ram. Toms hardware even did a test on it. They tested several games, programs and benchmarks on a system using 3 gigs of ram, 4 gigs of ram and so on up to like 12 gigs of ram I think. The conclusion was most people could get a way easy on 3 gigs of ram but 4 gigs is nice to have. There was no performance increase on games when going from 3 to 4 gigs or higher. Some multitasking ran better with 4 gigs of ram. The only things that showed more than 4 gigs of ram being better was benchmark tests, which is just pretty numbers. None of their real world tests showed any real improvement above 4 gigs of ram. Your video card is the most important factor. Getting the best gpu you can makes a big difference. Even with video cards ram isn't that important. A 512 meg card with a better gpu is always better than a cheaper card with 1 gig of ram. Of course you need a main board, power supply and cpu that can utilize the card as well. I run 4 gigs of ram and my girlfriend runs 3, neither of us have ever ran out of ram when using sl and running other applications in the background. I can run SL, gimp with god knows how many textures open, blender and numerous browser windows opened and I have never ran out of or ran low on ram. I even tried it with no paging file once.

looks like they are taking some cues from firestorm or at least input from those that use it. Although in firestorm you can choose if you want the side bar or not or how the layout looks with different skins. Maybe this is what LL will do once they get farther along with it. Make so you can turn it on or off if you want it or don't. Personally I don't like it. My biggest issue with any of the V3 viewers is it hangs after I log in while stuff loads so it takes forever for me to log in. And that is with LL, firestorm or Kirstens. Phoenix logs in in seconds. No idea why.

Ok I figured I would post some pictures of a few of my toys. I think those are all the bikes I have, but I have hundreds of cars obviously since we make them. These are just a handful of them. Yes I know that first vette is pink, it was a customer build. It might be pink, but comes weaponized lol. Trunk mounted chain gun and a plasma weapon. Oh and did I mention it fires AIM-9 nukes?

Ceka, i have a pink version of that vette with a rear mounted chain gun in it. And a dual turbo ls7 engine and flip up doors. That is actually one our shells, looks like its on a T&S chasis though. We also have bone stock version of that vette too with the original trubo fire v-8.

the pink one is a T&S bike, I used to work for them. That one is the drag bike, I also have the mirage racing bike. The mirage is a lot more fun to drive. The drag bike was pretty much just made for drag racing. If I get time later I will post up what mine looks like. I like to get the moddable ones so I can paint them myself.

huds on vehicles, ick. Just a personal opinion anyway. 7 of them, oh my god lol.

Ya I would agree, for any kind of vehicle written instructions should be included. Although I don't know why we bother, most don't read the darn things anyway lol. I even have videos that show how the products work and advanced features. I can't tell you the number of times I have given tech support and asked if they read the instructions and the answer was no. I don't even bother asking anymore lol. Most vehicles for basic use its pretty simple, arrow keys move you, page up and down shift gears. If it goes beyond this to simply drive a vehicle you most certainly should have well written instructions with the product. In multiple languages if possible. Heck I have a car that even with the instructions it was hard to figure out. And I make cars in sl! Why someone would make a vehicle so complicated is beyond me.

Plantronics Gamecom http://www.okaygeek.com/blog/plantronics-gamecom-377-gaming-headset-review.html A little large, but they sound great and mic works fantastic. Picks me up just fine but won't pick other noises in the room.

Ok Astral, I found some more info on your computer and I think I know some of what may be wrong with it. You will need to get with me so we can discuss it and I can try to explain how to fix it. For starters you have older version of the bios and it may not even support that video card. Two you installed the same brand of video card that is on the mother board, so you need to disable the onboard graphics before you can install the new one. I would say that was issue with it conflicting. What this is going to require is you uninstalling your current video card, enable your onboard graphics and hook your monitor up to that port. Then disable the on board graphics and swap them again. But before you do this you will need to flash your bios with a newer version and set the bios up again. But I found plenty of info on it so it should be too bad. I can walk you through it and you can take notes on what to change to get it up and running again and we can go from there. I will try to get with you inworld to go over all of it. Hopefully this should solve your issues. At the very least you will have the latest bios for your motherboard and the video card will be installed correctly.

It seems odd to me that SL is putting your video card under that much stress. Unless maybe you have shadows enabled. Normally for my system Sl just isn't that hard on my graphics card. Rivatune does let you map your fan control, but I am not sure they have a version for linux, never looked. I tried unbunto not that long ago and wasn't all that impressed with it. I went back to windows 7 because it gave me more overal performance in sl. Unbunto gave me about same perfermance as xp and vista as far as frame rates were concerned and was a but more confusing to use as far as installing drivers and what not. Wtih windows 7 I get about double the frame rates as the other os's and its simple to use. My opinion anyway. The only way I can get my gts 250 to run hotter than 70C is when running a benchmark. maybe there isn't enough room in your case for proper cooling for your video card?

I agree with peggy, just get the latest drivers from nvidia's website. all the cads use the same chipsets. Only differences are different coolers and fans and possible factory overclocks.

After spending some time with Astral in world and running some tests I don't believe its a bandwidth problem. I think it might possibly be a hardware problem. For one his computer is having problems seeing his GTX 465 as the main card and kind of switches back and forth. I had him run a furmark benchmark test and used his on board graphics to run the test. So not sure what sl is using. He disabled his onboard graphics and his performance went up a bit, but not as much as I think it should have. He is running with mid graphics with a draw distance of 96 meters. I run a GTS 250 and was getting higher frame rates than he was and I was in ultra with a 1024 draw distance. If I put mine in mid with that draw distance I would see close to 100 fps where we were standing. I am also perplexed that his system is seeing just under 4 gigs of ram when he is running a 64 bit OS. It should be showing 4096. He also mentioned he gets the blue screen sometimes when he starts his computer and it re boots. This smacks of a hardware issue to me. It might also be that he doesn't have a big enough power supply to run his system. He couldn't find anything on it that said what the outputt was. It kills me that I can't get my hands on it to look inside and poke around the bios lol. I really couldn't find crap as far as the layout for you bios in order to walk you through it. I am more familiar with the phoenix bios set ups myself. Maybe someone here has a MSI board with the AMI bios and can tell you what you need to look for. Another option would to be actually join a forum for computers and tell them what your problems are. Tom's Hardware has a very good forum. My advice, like I told you in world would be to first test your memory to rule that out. You can either run a long test on it. Or just pull a stick and boot back up and play around. Then shut the computer off and swap sticks and play around and see if the blue screen replicates with one of the sticks. If that is the case you have a bad stick of memory. its also possible since you said your dad was in there poking around he may have messed with your ram timings and they are not right. Overclocking ram is a science in my opinion lol. Most can figure out how to OC a video card or cpu, but messing with ram is a bit more advanced in my opinion. So my second piece of advice would be to re set your bios and see what happens. But if you do this, depending on your board you may have to go into the bios and disable the floppy drive options. If it tries to find a floppy drive and you don't have one it won't boot. And I guess it is possible that you have to tell your bios to disable the on board graphics. However most boards I have seen look for the PCIE slot first and will automatically disable the onboard graphics if it finds a dedicated video card. Then again, I have never owned an MSI board so I can't say 100 percent for sure. And you can always step back and punt, and reset your bios and re install windows. It should find the card and install it, which is what should have happened in the first place. He is also running his computer on a HD tv via a HDMI cable, which I have never messed with so I don't know if that is causing him issues either. I will note like the others have said though, regardless of how great your computer, cpu and mother board, some areas in sl just suck. High traffic, high lag areas will just be bad. If I go up in the air on a good sim I can pull 200 fps. I have been to some places where I am lucky to get 10 fps. But on our sim with your specs you should have been seeing more fps. Two things we really need to do is figure out how big your power supply is and either find some pictures of your bios options or someone that knows it well enough to explain what to look for.

You have a problem for sure, you should see much higher frame rates than that with that system. And turning it to low graphics they should really jump up, not stay the same. One thing that will help your frame rates is switching to windows 7 though. I was really hoping when I read your specs you would have an ATI card, those are notorious for not working well with SL since many of them have problems with open GL. But the card you have is way more than you need for sl. Kind of hard to trouble shoot from a forum though. Maybe I can get with you inwolrd and we can try some tests. First thing I would do is to check your bandwidth and ping to a server in the area sl uses, like sanfransisco or Dallas. You don't always get the same download speeds as you would from your local server. Especially if you are really far away, like the UK or Australia. Then I would check your ping and packet loss. If you have a high ping or packet loss things won't run well either. Then I would do some benchmarks and tests on your desktop to make sure your system is running as well as it should. It is possible a driver role back might help your issues, but that card should great on the latest drivers. To do some of this though it is going to require you downloading some programs and run them on your system though. And from what I have seen the standard SL viewer actually gives the best frame rates so I doubt switching to a third party viewer is going to instantly cure your problems. There has to be something going on that is limiting your frame rates.

OK after doing some research online and watching a ton of videos of different hardware and software employees I guess I will retract my statements. I even watched the south park special where it followed them for 6 days before air. From the looks of it I guess the times are just changing and things are more laid back and casual. I am not sure if that is a good thing or bad, but it is happening none the less. I guess I am just old lol. Sorry for slamming on you Rod. I will agree its rather bias of me to base your abilities on your appearance. But I come from a time where first impressions are important. I used to work for a computer store, and had I had shown up to work looking that way they would have fired me. And I rarely left the back room lol. But, dude, could you at least shave for an interview? Even if it is some crappy webcast thing lol. It would help us old farts see you in a better light wink.

That's the CEO of Linden Labs. I am suddenly not shocked or surprised by anything that happens anymore. He looks and sounds more like some bumb they pulled off the street to pretend to do an interview. From the sounds of it he more of a game developer than a CEO. Just not what I invision when I think of the head of a corporation. I sort of expect someone neat, well dressed, shaven, well spoken and hopefully someone with a business background in managing people. Doesn't have to be a three peice suit or anything. I mean Steve Jobbs nevers dressed up, but at least he looked good.