Since the latest blender updates my old laptop has stopped running blender and I’m currently working with an alpha version of the 5.1, the main version of which doesn’t run at all
Is there a way or a workaround to keep running the latest updates/versions?
Hi there,
What are the specs of your laptop, we can’t really help you at the moment, since we don’t know what hardware we are dealing with?
Dell Inspiron N5110
NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M
RAM 8GB
Processor Intel(R) Core™ i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz, 2501 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
Not really with those specs. CPU minimum but OK, Ram is the min required OK (for simple stuff), the main problem is GPU the minimum requirements for 5.1 are 2G VRam so unfortunately
will probably not run.
I do not think it is worth upgrading the GPU, I would stick to using an older Blender version that works with your card until you can update the whole system.
You do not need the latest Blender version to make good stuff. 
I had a look at your portfolio and there are some great things there.
actualy there is no big update in new blender version, same as ever
The problem is that it has been quit a few versions that need a graphics card with at least 2G to run view-port properly, even 3.5 states that min required is 2G.
The OP is lucky that it would run up till now. Blender does need more Vram than it used to use.
So, an update, I found a hack whereby I can run blender on my CPU
(The following steps were suggested by Claude ai)
1.Go to: github.com/pal1000/mesa-dist-win/releases
2.Download the latest mesa3d-X.X.X-release-msvc.7z
3.Extract it
4.Navigate to the x64 folder inside
5.Copy opengl32.dll , libgallium_wgl.dll , libglapi.dll from that folder
6.Paste it into your Blender folder (same place as blender.exe)
Blender will start running but unfortunately with slow viewport
I investigated further with ai and after disabling (Outline Selected) from viewport overlay I could remove the files added in the previous steps and run blender smoothly on my GPU.
Yet, when trying to zoom in/out or pan using the mouse wheel it crashed (though viewport gizmos perform the same operations with no crash)
Disabling (Auto Depth) from preferences stopped the crash.
Still, the following cause crashes and apparently there’s no workaround for them.
1- Selecting/deselecting a mesh/NURBS object in solid/rendered mode in the viewport
(a- Wireframe + X-ray mode together cause no crash in the viewport
b- Selecting/deselecting in the Outliner causes no crashes generally)
2- Adding Curves object (hair/fur..) or Point Cloud object (also includes viewing points in Geometry Nodes)
There are some other crashes and bugs that are inconsistent that I’m not sure how they came about nor how to replicate