[Chat Window....]

you're assuming linden labs gives a flying f what the users want. they don't. as someone else suggested, switch to a third party viewer. firestorm is what the vast majority of users use since it isn't fubar'd by idiots in their marketing department. so popular in fact linden labs changed the viewer regulations to prevent people from finding out about it except word of mouth. unfortunately firestorm's newest (server side appearance) version is badly buggy and will run out of memory for textures sooner (if you go to a lot of new destinations) or later. seems not to free not-in-use textures properly. so choose your poison, broken by bugs (which will be fixed) or broken by stubborn jerks (will never be fixed).

[SL expands to STEAM and improves graphics]

heh. well, it it is _really_ a killer system, it will not look bad. it's sad nobody's written a driver level opengl to directx translator. has to be possible, they're both languages for describing the same thing. obviously ms has no motive to create one.

[Which video card is best for SL, AMD Radeon or nVidia GeForce?]

nVidia is the only brand I would buy to work with SL. ATI has crappy drivers and they frequently don't work correctly with SL -- see "white screen" mentions in other replies. Also LL devs use nVidia so bugs that effect those cards get fixed much faster than ATI. I made the mistake of buying an ATI laptop for use with SL. Buy ATI at your own risk. I wouldn't.