Why am I not posting to my blog?
I post here when I want to share what is happening in my virtual life. For the most part, I try to follow the rule of “if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing”. Sometimes I rant and rave. It is MY blog, after all. *wry grin* But these days my virtual life is giving me mostly tears. And I’m loathe to come here and cry repeatedly.
Why has my my life in SL turned to tears? Because I loved SL so much, I bought myself what I was assured was a kick-donkey top of the line gaming computer – an Alienware M17x. I had to buy a new computer because the nVidia GeForce 8800M video cards in my Dell XPS M1730 burned out in November and Dell and nVidia could not tell me when the cards could be replaced. Up til then, well, I’d found Dell first line support a bit annoying, but no more so than much of life. Dealing with ordering the Alienware became an ordeal, thanks to Dell, who now own Alienware. I was going to blog about that, but quite honestly – it infuriated me every time I thought about it and I didn’t think that frustration and agony needed to be aired.
At long last my gorgeous fantastic super-duper Alienware M17x arrived (late, thank you Dell Order Modification Dept). Sensational. Until I ran SL. 30 minutes into it, then Blue Screen of Death. The whole first weekend – BSOD on SL, Portal Factory, SOLITAIRE!!!!! I mean – obviously a Dell issue. Then mysteriously it stopped BSOD’ing. Only SL died. Repeatedly. With the BSOD. Sometimes with just “normal” SL crash-end. I called SL support to see if they could help. With great joy in his typing, Fog informed me that I was running unsupported software and graphics. Not HIS problem. Oh? Then why are so many folk running the same and SL works for them?
Anyway, there really is a post here someday about Dell and Linden Labs and customer support if I can stop crying. I took a day and drove my computer to an SL friend who has years experience in getting machines to run SL. We thought it was solved. It seemed to run without crashing. No BSOD. Until I brought it home. Turned it on, raced into SL. Hung out there for an hour. Went to feed the cats, the dog. Came back to BSOD. Rebooted – let it sit running Firefox and Norton for an hour. No problem. Raised the machine on blocks (better ventilation). Went into SL with my alt. Didn’t move, just sat there. 2 hours – SL crash.
The truth is, I’m no techie. By my mother I’m a techie, but by a techie I’m no techie. I do NOT know what to do, where to turn, except to continually throw myself and my useless extremely expensive computer onto the mercy of friends. And there is only so long you can impose on friends. Dell isn’t going to care that one application doesn’t run – they will blame the application. And trying to fight your way past firstline support sucks you dry of all energy, patience and coherent thought. And LL has already gleefully told me THEY don’t care.
So I sit and look at this $$$$$ computer that won’t do the one thing for which I bought it, and I cry. Maybe that makes me a drama queen or totally emotional. So be it. But because I cry every time I look at it, and I cry each time I boot up SL on my other computer (which needs to run other software, do other things), I’m not having fun. I have nothing positive to share. I cry, my heart sinks, and all I want to do is simply walk away from SL for good and go back to reading. THAT is technology that actually works right out of the box. 😦
Ahuva's Blog 
*hugs* I remember how awful it was that week when SL would crash my machine every five minutes for no apparent reason.
If it’s BSOD’ing, Dell really ought to care; a mere application shouldn’t in theory be able to destroy the whole machine like that. But, as you say, first-line support’s main mission is to get you to go away, so they may very well not acknowledge that fact without making you suffer unduly first.
I know it’s not much comfort, but the way these things tend to go I’ll bet before long you’ll get it to a state where SL doesn’t crash any more often than it crashes for the rest of us. 🙂 And you won’t have to cry anymore…
hmm… this was sad indeed Ahuva; the machine certainly looks powerful enough to run SL well indeed; and powered with Intel and nVidia it should be very compatible.
Have you tried other viewers? I have very good experiences with Boy Lanes Rainbow viewer and Cool Viewer; Boy seems to know a lot about the quirks of various graphics cards.
Then you have the Emerald viewer, and Kirstenlee with a totally different rendering code.
Other than that, get the latest gc drivers if available.
Hope this may help, but these bugs are hard.
Cris.
@Dale – i would think that an application should not be able to bring about the BSOD. but unfortunately – it happens a lot – not just to me in this instance.
@Cris – aren’t you the smart one? because indeed that seems to be the way around this issue. i planned to post a blog on it – but in the meantime i destroyed stuff on my work laptop. sigh. don’t let me near your computers. so i got side-tracked. but YES – it does appear that running Emerald has enabled me to get into SL and stay there for nearly 4 hours before SL crashed. NOT the computer – SL. no BSOD. i would breathe a sigh of relief and say, okay, i’m staying, except that i can’t save any photos out of SL. i don’t know if that is due to some Emerald setting or something in Windows 7 or what. but that is unacceptable to me – i NEED photos. so i am closer, but not there yet.
I feel your pain, Ahuva. And I hope you do return to SL. For me, it was a high-end HP Laptop purchased specifically for running SL at work. NVIDIA graphics card inside. Works great until exiting SL and then the screen would solarize when SL exited. I posted to the SL support forms, got the same “unsupported hardware” message as you got, then others wrote in with the same problem! Now I know what it is like to be ignored.