Posted by:  la woodget

As a new owner of the MacBook Pro, I was chagrined to realize that my connection to SL was destined to end in a crash within only a few minutes of logging on. Some sessions I crashed up to ten times:( A visit to my local Apple shop gleaned some information that I’ll describe in my non-computer-ese (so bear with this if you’re a computer genius). The newest MacBook Pros have been equipped with an enviable graphics card that offers incredible resolution. This card, however, is somehow not compatible with SL. Or, rather, the driver that runs the card is not compatible with SL. According to “D” at the Apple Store, there is some type of ‘bug’ in the driver when it connects to SL that causes the visual memory to stack up without occasionally clearing itself, which eventually results in an overload to the graphics card and the inevitable crash (I warned this wouldn’t be technical!). Anyhow, both Nvidia (the maker of the card) and Mac (the maker of the driver) are aware of the problem and are working on a solution. “D” pointed out, however, that with Mac slotted to release the new OS ‘Leopard’ this October, it’s probably not their highest priority to fix problems with the old OS ‘Tiger’ that is on the most recent macs. However, since the new MacBook Pros with the OS ‘Leopard’ will have the same graphics card, it is almost a guarantee that Apple has people working diligently to ensure that problem is rectified for all ‘Leopard’ users, which will hopefully mean that ‘Tiger’ users will also receive an update that will solve the irksome issue. If not, an upgrade to ‘Leopard’ just might solve the problem. Since being known as a ‘gaming friendly computer’ is important to Apple, one way or another a solution should be coming at least some point in the near future… what an embarrassment if it doesn’t!

Meanwhile, for users like me who would like to keep their current computers (or have no choice), there are a few things that can for now remedy the frequent crashing, or at least scale it down considerably (without having to switch to Windows and use Bootcamp). Since the crashing occurs when there is too much graphic memory built up, minimizing that memory can help. There are a few ways to do this. On the SL login page, you can go under “Preferences” before you log on and alter the settings. To do this, select the tab that says “Graphics” and at the very top of the screen you will see a box with the words ‘run in a window’ beside it. Make sure that this box is NOT checked. This will make SL fill your entire screen. Operating it in a window requires more from the graphics card because it is required to essentially read and store the information for TWO screens. Next, play around with the ‘Draw Distance’ setting. 128 or 96 are best. You won’t be able to see as far in the distance, but then what joy is a ten second view followed by a crash? If you don’t mind a slight decrease in the graphic quality, you can also decrease the Fullscreen Aspect Ratio. The standard selection is 1440×900, but you can change that to 1152×720, or even lower, though this will significantly decrease the pixels and make the picture look fuzzy. I have found that I do not need to change this last setting at all to get good results, but it’s another option. Finally, one other alteration you can make is to the Mac setting themselves. For this, you go under the Apple in the upper left hand corner of your desktop screen (before SL is running), select ‘System Preferences’ and then click on the ‘Display’ icon. Here you will see that the normal display setting is 1440×900. If you lower the setting to 1280 x800 your screen will seem a bit more fuzzy, but this too will help decrease your chances of frequent SL crashes. When I’m not using SL, I change the setting back to standard. With some or all of these changes, hopefully your SL experience will include more time enjoying the metaverse and less time crashing.

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