As I said before, Second Life is really important to me. Its severe hardware requirements are a big portion of the specification of this computer, in particular, getting enough RAM was part of the reason I wanted a 64 bit OS. Machines with 32 bit OSes max out at about 3.5 Gb and I need at least 2 Gb for a comfortable SL experience plus whatever Vista feels like consuming for itself.
Anyway, I downloaded the latest SL build and installed it. Cranked it up and it fell over straightaway. Started it again and I was at least able to login before it crashed. Then I started to wonder about the video drivers. The standard advice on the SL forums is to use the absolute latest drivers.
Hiding deep inside the nVidia Control Panel was the information that my ForceWare version was 158.xxx but no indication of whether this was out of date or, indeed, how to update it. So, it was off to the nVidia website. Not too hard to locate and download ForceWare 163.xxx. Yeah, I was a tad out of date.
Latest drivers installed, SL starts up and stays up. And it’s fun. I’m getting 48 fps standing still whereas I never got 20 on the old machine. If I fly around, I can pull the fps down to 25 (a lot better than the 6-7 I usually get). Then I notice Vista’s memory usage is only 600 Mb. So, I realise I need to configure my SL preferences a bit. I turned on almost all the graphic options except anisotropic filtering and increased my visual range to 128 m. I can go anywhere I want now, frame rates rarely drop below 30, movements are smooth and it feels the way it’s supposed to be. RAM usage is above 1 Gb all the time but not too much. CPU usage is about 60-70% on each core.