Phoenix Viewer 1.6.1 with Windows 8

I’m sure a lot of users have switched up to windows 8 over the past week.  I my self have been using the consumer preview since last spring on a secondary desktop PC. Phoenix doesn’t run properly in Windows 8. While it installs fine and launches fine, it will fail during login. It will either just hang there not progressing with the login or crash with an odd error message I’ve never seen before.

I’ve told the Phoenix Team about this months ago when Win8 was still in “preview” and they don’t seem to care. It’s hard to do any support on an unofficial operating system that can change drastically from beta form to official releases. At that time I didn’t really care since I wasn’t using Windows 8 on a PC I used full time, and it was a “Preview” version of windows and would likely had been a bug that would probably work it self out once the retail version of windows 8 is released.

So Windows 8 is released. I used the Windows Update Assistant app that scans your system looking for hardware AND software incompatibilities. It did not see Phoenix viewer as being incompatible nor much of anything i had as incompatible  Most of the things listed as incompatible was ironically microsoft software.

So I did a clean install of Windows 8, zapped my boot HDD clean by deleting partitions and installed Windows 8 from a DVD image i burned (which upgrade assistant creates for you). Installed it, updated it, installed drivers, bla bla bla.  installed Firestorm and it works.  Installed Phoenix and it crashes on login.

Quick answer to fox this?  Set compatibility mode for the Phoenix Viewer shortcut to Windows 7.

Right click the icon for Phoenix, compatibility tab, and Checkmark compatibly mode so it’s enabled, and choose windows 7. Selecting Windows XP SP3 will not work. Keep in mind this is compatibility mode, not any sort of virtualization mode. So you don’t need a copy of windows 7 laying around or installed to use this.

Oddly enough if you turn off the compatibility mode after you have successfully logged in, Phoenix will still work. It only seems to fail when logging in with the viewer for the first time after a clean install. So it’s best if you leave compatibility mode on if you have alts and want to log them on, or it will fail.

One last thing about Window 8, or any fresh instal of Windows.  Windows does NOT come with OpenGL since it’s open source and Microsoft is not allowed to distribute it with a comercial product like Windows. Second Life does not use DirectX. This is why Second Life is cross platform since it dosen’t rely on Microsoft. Be sure to download and install the proper drivers for your Video GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and will come with OpenGL. Taken from the Phoenix/Firestorm Wiki…

Nvidia Video Drivers

• Latest driver Last checked Oct 17- Windows: 306.97 (Oct 10) – Linux: 304.51 (Sep 24)

AMD (ATI) Video Drivers

• Latest driver Last checked Oct 22- Windows and Linux: 12.10 (Oct 22) – Beta 12.11 (oct 22)

Intel Video Drivers

• Intel driver download page Intel does not have a universal driver set. Please go to Intel’s site and select the appropriate download.

Have fun!!

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