thanks for that post
it got me back into a graphical viewer for 2nd life after weeks of thinking I could only run Metabot on my laptop,
I'm curently running SL on an older( 2008) ultraportable laptop, - win xp, core 2 duo 2.4Ghz , with 3gb ram and intel gma4500hd graphics chipset, screen set to 1280x800 resolution.
as advised turned all settings to low and experimented with various viewers, working with a dsl 512k internet provider over wifi,
found... 2nd life / firestorm / singularity would not run, either wouldnt allow connection or crashed upon connection,
however... Catzip / kokua / meercat / rainbow viewer, all allow connection with Catzip and Rainbow being the fastest loading, and Rainbow being the viewer I've opted for ,
as long as I dont push the graphics past mid, and keep the draw distance down and do my chatting from low lag simms its all working great,...