What system requirements to I need to have in order for my laptop to show mesh on my viewer?

[Cubay Farlight]

I am using a Toshiba Satellite A215 with AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile technology TL-60, 2000 Mhz, 2 Core, 2 Logical processor, My operating system is Windows Vista. I have tried to change settings in the preferences but a couple of the settings wont allow me to change them. I would like if somebody could please help me figure this out as to what I need to do. I really am hoping I am not going to have to go buy some parts just to view this although I wouldn't be surprised if I do. But I just want an honest answer as to what I need to do or if somebody could contact me inworld and see if they can try and walk me through changing some settings to the viewer maybe and try that as well.

[Rolig Loon]

That Toshiba notebook is a nice little machine, but it's built primarily for light use -- web browsing and playing movies and audio.  It's probably going to only be able to run an SL viewer at the lowest quality setting, which means that you'll have to do without most of the graphics features that everyone around you will be enjoying.  Many of them will automatically be grayed out by your viewer, and inaccessible.  If you try to push it, you'll find that your performance (FPS and grpahics rendering speed) will drop dramatically and you may start crashing.  Second Life puts a pretty heavy demand on a computer.  For one thing, it doesn't do a one-time download of its graphics to your machine, the way most online games do.  In world graphics are continually being updated and fed back to your viewer.  For another thing, most of what you see was created by amateurs -- SL is a user-created world -- so very little of it is optimized for efficient use of memory or processing time.  That, too, adds to the load your own machine has to handle.  Notebooks, in general, can't deal with that sort of load easily.

As an additional note, your Toshiba has an AMD graphics card, which can be more problematic in SL's OpenGL environment than an NVidia card. 

[Nalates Urriah]

Try this site to see if you can run SL. This is not perfect, but it should give you and idea. Can I Run Second Life?

To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. 

Laptops use a power save mode that often disables the video card. Check that your video settings in your video ctrols are for Performance, which will run the video card rather than attempt to save power. Also, run plugged into wall power.

You can try setting your graphics settings in the viewer to LOW before logging in.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I looked that Toshiba up on Google.  I found an independant review that gave the notebook a decent (but not particularly great) review.  The date of that review was August 13, 2007........that is just under 5 years ago.  Five years ago that computer would probably run SL decently at mid settings (and very sluggishly at high to, what is now called, ultra).  A viewer that has mesh capablilities is going to require, what was back in 2007, settings at high or better.  Your notebook will not handle mesh (that's what progress does.........you have to keep up or you get left behind).  You are one of those who are watching SL disappear over the horizon because your computer cannot keep up.  You didn't say otherwise so I have to assume that the computer is pretty much stock, off the shelf on the specs.  A few of the problems that are important right now (that were not so important 5 years ago).  The graphics are reported as a 128 - 319 MB shared memory Radeon X1200.........that is an onboard graphics adapater (very weak for 3D graphics).  It's reported to have a 250GB, 4200 RPM hard drive (that's a very slow hard drive).  The importance of your drive's speed is because your video adapter does not have video RAM to handle the huge amount of graphics information that SL requires of any computer so it must "borrow" if from your system RAM.  And your system RAM is listed at 2 GB.......plenty for Vista 32 bit but that's about it (Vista wants about 1.5 GB just to run itself......you have 512 MB to spare and that's not near enough when your video adapter wants as much as it can get).  The only thing Windows can do is use virtual RAM, or a paging file on your hard drive.  And you have a slow hard drive..........it just won't work well at all.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3886

The long and short if it that your computer is not strong enough for any viewer for SL that has mesh capabilities.  The best you can probably do is use a viewer based on the old SL viewer 1.23.  And those are getting harder and harder to find because that viewer code does not allow a big part of what SL has to offer to it's users.  LL quit suporting the 1.23 viewer nearly 2 years ago and removed the link to the download for that viewer almost a year ago.  It's an obsolete viewer.  And you are going to have a very hard time finding a setup download for it unless you happened to have saved it back when it was available for download.  I think I have a setup copy saved on my other hard drive but I'm not going to present it to anyone for downloading (or send it to anyone).  I won't open myself up to liabilities from people I don't know....nor would I encourage anyone to use a file from a stranger (and I'm a stranger to you.........you'd be foolish to take a file from me and put it on your computer.  Every bit as foolish as accepting a file from a phishing email you recieved). 

You need a new computer.

[Junior Lennier]

hello I'm here to tell you that I do not want to renew my premium account what should I do thanks

[Rolig Loon]

Read http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Premium-membership/ta-p/1054477#Section_.7 . Pay particular attention to the final bit: "Note: When you cancel your account, it remains active until the end of your payment period. You may still log in and use Second Life during this time. For instance, if you buy a yearly Second Life membership and cancel it the next day, you are still be treated as a premium member for the next year!"