Hi Jeff, The system crash on your laptop indicates it is a graphics driver problem. Unfortunately these are very common -- maybe 1 in 20 driver version / graphics card combinations have Chimera crashing or system crashing bugs. I intend to make a web page that includes all the bad combinations we have encountered -- hopefully I'll get to it in January. The reason Chimera is particularly susceptible to these bugs is that it uses many capabilities of the OpenGL 3-d graphics library -- some that are seldom used by video games and other 3-d applications. There are only 4 practical solutions: 1) update the driver, 2) use an older driver, 3) set driver options to use less OpenGL acceleration, or 4) use a different machine. I use solution 2 on my home machine with an Nvidia Quadro driver that is a dozen versions behind the current one and over a year old. New drivers come out fairly often for both Nvidia and ATI cards and usually do not offer better performance -- only a new set of bugs (old ones fixed, new ones introduced). If you could send us a Chimera bug report by starting Chimera and use menu entry Help / Report a Bug this will send us your graphics driver version so we can include it on our bad drivers page. And if you find another driver version that works I would of course like to know which version. Sorry to offer so little help on this. Tom From: Jeff To: "'Thomas Goddard'" <goddard@cgl.ucsf.edu> Subject: chimera and my ATI card Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 23:59:26 -0800 hi Tom, on my laptop (IBM T43p), chimera is crashing the machine. I have the latest release installed in WinXP (as of 12/21), and a fairly recent release (within 2006) installed on Linux (also on same machine, different drive). this occurs with both really small volumes (100 cubed) and larger ones (600x400x100 or so), doing common tasks like rotating a surface rendering. in XP, it froze with a required reboot; with Linux, I got the screen that I have attached. the GPU is an 'ATI MOBILITY FireGL V3200', which was one of the GPUs you could get on a 'workstation laptop' back in June '05. I am pretty sure the drivers are current (within '06) and I use the ATI proprietary drivers in both XP and Linux - there is a standard ATI driver package that you download and then it just installs the proper version for your card. On an older laptop (prior to '05) I had similar issues with crashing, also on an ATI card, but different generation (was a Dell purchased in feb. '02). on my desktop workstation with an NVidia card, it works fine, although sometimes surfaces get rendered in the wrong place (something in background looks more in foreground, etc) - but I don't have problems with chimera getting killed (or killing the OS). any thoughts on having it run on my laptop? this machine is the only one I have access to outside of the lab, and was originally bought for this purpose (reconstructions and processing). thanks, -jeff