Nigel Paravane

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Second Life recently but haven’t had too much time to write about it. I’ve now got some land, a temporary house, as well as an office building for my group. As I mentioned in another blog entry, I’ll be having a group meeting in SL later this month, so several of my team members have been getting SL accounts and going inworld. Some of them have had some problems getting on in the first place because of graphics adapter issues. That is, the program would either crash or they would be told that they didn’t haven’t the right hardware.

While this explanation is undoubtedly true for some people, it may be that you just need to install a new graphics driver. I can’t tell you how to do this in general, other than check on your computer provider’s service website.

In particular, for those of you with Thinkpads, you should go to the Lenovo downloads site. Choose “Automatically download and install drivers.” This utility will look at your whole laptop and suggest recommended updates and this includes things that Windows Update does not. When you get the application installed and running, look for an update that concerns video and give it a try. It worked for three of my colleagues.

Here are some support sites for popular computer brands:

• Dell
• Gateway
• HP
• IBM
• Lenovo
• Sony