Luca Coeur

Hey, that's a cool point of view: All people not agreeing with me must be LL fanbois, so it's not worth your time.. Get real, that's outright funny! I confess, I like the progress being made and I surely hope for more to come

You might want to have a look at Third Party Viewers, they have the capability of "temporary uploads". Those are costfree and working on the main grid. The drawback is: only you can see it as those items exist in your cache only. But for development that might be ok.. Best regards

Maybe you can take a look in the BIOS-Settings, there might be an option under internal devices to disable the onboard graphics. I did that with my Lenovo (internal Intel graphics + additional AMD/ATI 3650 chip). I lost the power savings (neglectable for me) and won a great performance :-)

Maybe your working stairs consist of two prims: a visible sculpted stair which is set phantom and a non phantom but invisible ramp to walk on. Together both prims create the illusion of walking on the stairs. If you rezz out only the sculpty stairs then you walk through the (phantom) prim or - if set non phantom - you may run against a wall.

NVidia lists 280.26 released at 2011.08.09 as the most recent driver. If it is better suited for your card I don't know and can't say anything about it as I don't use Windows and I have an AMD/ATI card... Just for convenience - the DL link:http://www.nvidia.de/object/win7-winvista-32bit-280.26-whql-driver-de.html

Maybe the function llSetScriptState( string name, integer run ) is what you look for?

I'd have a look at all those educational places in SL and would attend some classes there as well. Then you get a feeling about what is possible in SL and how it can be done - some of those institutes here have several years of experience in teaching in SL ;-) There is an annual conference about "Virtual World Best Practices in Education" (VWBPE), but there are others too. If you like some starting points IM me inworld (I'm on european timezone though)... Best regards..

And there are quite some beautiful mods for the Uchi Cat Avatar too

You can setup a sim which is not connected to the SL grid in anyways with the opensimulator software (http://opensimulator.org) or with the Aurora Project (http://aurora-sim.org/). In both cases you won't get a download - install - "ready to work" experience though as you get an empty space - and I mean empty! You have to create next to everything yourself. While that's ok for building, you might not like your "Ruth" appearance doing machinima ;-) And unfortunatly you can't simply buy some cool things from market place or any other source! You are mostly on your own... That said, you can always find a lot of scripts, textures and even complex objects in the internet. So depending on your goals, you might come along with those sources. Best of luck from my side

Do you think of this one maybe? https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/NOTSO-BIGAVS-BOX/928632

As far as your own creations are concerned there are viewers which can export your builds to a local disk as an XML-file. The textures can be "saved as", and scripts can be edited (and thus saved) via external editor. Exporting bought objects might be a different thing though as it might be seen as copybotting. Afterall you might be able to reimport it under a different name and with different permissions and even under your name as creator! And you won't have a licence to export said things to different grids, which would be feasible with exported items. So - in short - I don't think, you're allowed to make a backup copy of bought items to your local disk. That's where a redelivery-policy of the store kicks in ;-) Regards Luca Edited due to typos

There's the opensim-project (http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page). You can use that to setup your own regions not connected to the SL-grid. Be warned though as it is not a trivial click and use software .... It needs some technical background to get into use. Another possibility - not tried out though - would be the Aurora-Project: (http://aurora-sim.org/). Hope that helps

Did you check lossless compression for the upload?