Comments on: Second Life on Old Laptops

By: Randy Yates

Randy Yates — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:42:55 +0000

I bet it won't run on these old laptops http://vintagelaptops.com

By: laptop

laptop — Sun, 23 May 2010 13:20:13 +0000

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By: Iggy

Iggy — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:46:27 +0000

SL's been running fine on my pumped up, three-year-old MacBook pro. I'm always carping in NWN and my blog about how it won't run on my students' laptops well (PC and Mac) but often they refuse to plug into a hard-wired connection. I do fine on wireless, especially since I tried this–being no technie, I just listened to some unverified advice–I plugged in the AC adapter.

The speed bump is considerable, on wireless or wired connections. Now we'll see what happens with SL 2.0.

By: Peter Stindberg

Peter Stindberg — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:00:53 +0000

I blogged about running SL on low-spec netbooks here: http://stindberg.blogspot.com/2009/06/running-s... – and in the meantime Boy Lane had made a version of his Rainbow Viewer especially aimed at netbooks.

By: Mitch Wagner

Mitch Wagner — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:46:34 +0000

Last year, I ran SL on a 2002 laptop. It ran fine. Looked good too — obviously way more cartoony than on a high-end machine, but perfectly reasonable to look at.

By: lufpleh

lufpleh — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 06:24:09 +0000

I'm on a 4 year old Toshiba laptop, 1.6GHz Celeron CPU, 1G memory and with ATI 200M Express graphics, never supported by LL and since early last year not by ATI.
It was just shear luck it ran SL in the first place, many similar Toshiba models, Satellite A-100, come with SL incompatible cards.
Admittedly performance is poor, top FPS I have ever seen is 20+ FPS in mouselook mode on an empty sim and yes it drops like a stone in busy areas. Single figure FPS are a fact of my SL life, a fact I have got used to, a situation that has taught me a lot about lag and performance.

I also use Snowglobe, but don't see an appreciable performance benefit comparedd to 1.23 or Emerald or any other viewer. I prefer it for the built in language translation and faster Map draw.

I am not at all surprised to see the numbers shown in Gwens video or her claim that SL runs okay on old hardware,
my crap laptop even made it into Blue Mars!

What stuns me is that after 4 years its still able to run SL as good as, if not better now than it was 4 years ago.

Some would say that shows how little SL has progressed, I think its a tribute to the engineers at LL who have been able to improve SL, with additons like Havok 4, Mono and Windlight (yes I can partially use windlight but only if I plan on not moving!) and yet still allow low spec users to survive in world.

Using old slow hardware is not for everyone, its a different SL world, not as rich and immersive as many more fortunate get to experience but at least its possible to experience and participate even if it is slow, flat and laggy.

I for one will certainly appreciate 30+ FPS when I upgrade to a new PC

By: tinselsilvera

tinselsilvera — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:58:26 +0000

Snowglobe is the only SL viewer I've been able to run successfully on my older pc's. The other viewers' have long since surpassed my older pc's ability.