Starting a Second Life

Eeesh – I signed up for a ‘Second Life’ account today – I’m not convinced about how much time I’ll spend on it, given the time investment I’m already giving the World of Warcraft (Ding L65 today!).

Anyway, it fits in nicely with the social networking research that I’m doing at work so – we’ll see how it goes.

The registration isn’t too hard, a 30Mb download for the client and we should be underway… of course, I’m just going to have time to do the client download and no time for the initial ‘orientation’ as work is getting in the way so /sigh… meh.

Second Life Error Message
PMSL – What a great start! At work I’m running Vista on a fairly grunty box attached to our lab network, yet this is my first experience of Second Life… for the record, my graphics card on this PC is an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series, so it’s no small fry!

Checking out the support section of the website, I’m told (in bold no less) that “Second Life does NOT currently support Windows Vista” so, I guess that is that… You’d think that with a Beta programme as long as Vistas was, their developers whould have ensured that their product would work once the new Operating System was released!

One of my collegues is currently on the phone to our Corporate Hellpdesk to see if they will allow us to install on our corporate machines (instead of the Lab) – we figure we may have a chance given that there’s a few corporates out there already out there who are getting into the virtual world… </holding breath>

Update: 14:29

Potentially – the latest drivers for Vista might fix the problem, so 67Mb is coming down the pipe… 100Mb to view a virtual world.

Update: 14:50

Right – the updated drivers appear to work and I’m currently working through the training in how to use the world. First impressions, I’m somewhat underwhelmed – the graphics seem blocky and basic, the lag is definatly noticible, the learning curve for anything over and above moving and simple chat is steep and the requirement to interact is… well, limited – perhaps it’ll grow on me, but I’m certainly not planning to rush back to SL to meet up with my new friends…


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