Kalor Rayner

First the specs for my HP desktop.

• AMD Phenom(tm) 9650 Quad-Core Processor at 2310 MHz (x4)
• Windows Vista Home Premium x64 Edition 6.0 (build: 6002) Service Pack 2
• 7GB RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT 1GB
• Not sure on sound, but it tells me RealTek High Definition Audio. Most likely it is an integrated sound card.

Just upgraded the video card and power supply last night. Have all the latest drivers installed. Have tried both the Emerald Viewer Optimized (which is the one I prefer) and the standard LL Viewer. Both have the same result. Anywhere from a few seconds to a couple minutes after logging in, the viewer crashes with a dialog box asking to send the error information. I have even tried setting it to run as Windows XP just to see if I had a different result. Of course, nothing changed, it still crashed. What was I doing in world? It didn't matter, because sometimes it would crash before I even had a chance to move.

So, any feedback would be appreciated. I spent money upgrading the video card and power supply specifically for SL. I'd really like to be able to take advantage of it.

BTW: I backed up the log files that were created in the crash dump, if anyone is interested in that.

katiem1066

And it was stable before the gfx upgrade? Maybe try and older version of the drivers, if you can find it.

Also, under graphics preferences -> hardware options, make sure you've got less than 700 mb or so of memory allocated to textures.

Kalor Rayner

No, it wasn't. I upgraded because SL would completely crash my desktop (BSOD). I currently use SL on my laptop, which is a less powerful system. Want to try to use my desktop so I can get the better performance and better graphics. So far, I haven't been successful.

Kalor Rayner

Oh, and here are my graphics settings currently:

High (no customization)

Hardware Settings:
Filtering: Not Checked
Antialiasing: 4x
Gamma: 0
Enable VBO: Checked
Texture Memory: 512MB (which appears to be max)
Fog Distance Ratio: 4.0

Kalor Rayner

Just a thought. Would upgrading to 64bit Windows 7 make a difference? Could it be a problem with Vista 64? I'd rather wait to upgrade my Windows, due to cost, but wonder if anyone else has any knowledge that might help here.

Cindy Claveau

I've been using 64bit Vista for a while, and honestly I haven't had any better or worse luck with it than I did with XP 32-bit.

More important, I believe, is your graphics card and the graphics settings you configure in the client.

Also, I switched from the standard LL client to the latest Emerald Life and I notice that I seem to crash more when saving photos to HD or viewing other people's profiles than I did before.

I recommend playing with the graphics pipeline you set in your preferences and, failing that, look in the knowledge base for info on your graphics card drivers.

__________________
Sometimes, "I hit it with my axe" is the best solution.

Kalor Rayner

The graphics card is a nVidia GeForce 9800GT with 1GB memory. It exceeds the minimum and even the recommended requirements for SL. It was actually recommended to me by another member when I was looking to upgrade my video card specifically for SL.

Vista recognizes the card and has the latest drivers installed (done via Windows Update, and nVidia's site appears to have the same drivers). The recommended settings inside of SL recommend HIGH. Also, I've now tried multiple viewers (default LL, Snowglobe, Emerald, Frequency) and all the viewers seem to crash on me within a few moments.

I'm not at home at the moment, so when I get home, I'm going to uninstall all viewers and delete all associated folders and registry keys (if any). I'll reinstall the standard LL viewer and mess with the graphics settings to see if there is any change. I'm just not confident that it will have any effect, but am willing to try anything at this point.

Edit: Oh, and searching the SL knowledge base is like an effort in futility. Their wiki and flogs are horrible. I've tried looking and will continue to look.

Cindy Claveau

One of my biggest disappointments after buying my last PC (3Ghz duo-core with a GEForce 8800 512mb) was that I couldn't run SL at the highest settings. Due to the heavily streamed content, I was only getting a marginal performance increase over my old 2.4Ghz/128Mb. Everything else I used, including graphics-heavy games, ran like lightning.

I'd suggest pulling your graphics settings back a bunch and then, if that helps, incrementally increase things until you start crashing again.

Kalor Rayner

Yeah, I'm going to try that, just to be sure. Worst case scenario, I continue using my laptop at lowest settings, going to Ultra only for snapshots. At least I know that works. Sure would be nice, though, to get the desktop working better.

Kalor Rayner

Well, I downloaded the nVidia drivers from the nVidia web site. Turns out there were newer drivers there, I missed them the first time I viewed the site.

I uninstalled all viewers and deleted associated folders and temporary files.

I installed the new nVidia drivers, turing off my firewall and virus protection at nVidia's suggestion and restarted my computer.

I installed the LL Default Viewer and launched it from the setup. Immediate viewer crash.

Relaunched LL Default Viewer and this time the login window appeared. I went into Edit -> Preferences before logging in to check settings and the viewer crashed again.

This is getting ridiculous now. Anyone have any other ideas on what I can look at?

Sobriquet Kryakutnoy

Open your run dialog (Win Key + R) and point it to open the following folder:

%appdata%\SecondLife\logs

There, open the SecondLife.log and scroll down to the bottom, there may be some output there as to what exactly is causing the viewer to crash.

Kalor Rayner

I've looked at the logs to some extent and haven't found anything that indicates why it is crashing. Didn't post them here because they were too long, but can zip them and upload them to my site for download.