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Second Life doesn’t run on my Vista machine

My Second Life explorations have been curtailed of late by a very irritating Windows Vista glitch that suddenly requires you to have a supported graphics card to run the game.

The Second Life Knowledge Base is depressingly final on the subject:

If you receive this message under Vista, are running graphics hardware that meets our Minimum System Requirements, and cannot find a driver provided by your graphics vendor which provides OpenGL support, you will be unable to run Second Life under Windows Vista on that computer.

Grrr.

I use a Dell 620 with a fair bit of RAM and a dual core processor, so take this as a warning if you’re a Second Life member about to upgrade. Apparently you need a supported, dedicated graphics card, even if the software was running fine on Windows XP.

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Antony Mayfield

6 responses to “Second Life doesn’t run on my Vista machine”

  1. Ian Delaney Avatar
    Ian Delaney

    And there I was thinking there was no good reason to ‘upgrade’ to Vista…

  2. Antony Mayfield Avatar
    Antony Mayfield

    That’s a brilliantly curmudgeonly way of looking at it Mr D ;-)

  3. Antony Mayfield Avatar
    Antony Mayfield

    BTW I have managed to get Vista running faster now by turning off lots of the flashy graphics stuff. Call me shallow, but surely that was most of the reason to get it… So if you have less than 1GB of RAM and a dual core processor, maybe wait a while…

  4. David Hultcrantz Avatar
    David Hultcrantz

    YOU’RE GONNA QUIT RIGHT NOW. YOU HAVE TO INSTALL THE LATEST DRIVER FROM ATI. Its free. However it crashes within 2 seconds so we’re all waiting for second life to sort it out. YOU DON’T HAVE TO JUST WALK AWAY!!!!!!!!

  5. Tom Lehman Avatar
    Tom Lehman

    I’m having trouble running second life on a 620 in XP Pro. 2m, nvidia card with 256m. Suggestions would be very welcome.

  6. MrRetardo Avatar
    MrRetardo

    If it’s a Lattitude D620, that might be why also.

    I’m a Dell Field Technician, and 90% of my calls are to replace motherboards on those models.

    I’m also an SL Premium Member since 2005 ;)

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