Peggy Paperdoll

Start here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clothing_Tutorials You'll see links to tons of information, including tutorials for GIMP and Photoshop. The only problem I see (by the wording in your post) is that you are unfamilar with higher end image/texture editing software. The very first thing you need to master is the software that you choose to use.....only after you get fairly familar with what the software can do (and how to make it do what you want) will you be able to making Second Life clothing. Don't jump into it without learning the basics first........you'll get so frustrated (believe me........been there, done that).

So, according to your theory throttling the speed is accomplishing the goal of saving bandwidth usage. I can't go along with that Rolig. If you were to have some cutoff that occurs after a specified length of time slowing the speed will, indeed, lessen the usage for that specified time. And the end result you wait for twice as long for things to happen in SL. That's not an effective way to deal with usage.........why bother with SL at all if you never get to enjoy it? The only "effective" way to use less bandwidth is to set the viewer and limit your actions so that not much is called for by the viewer. At least that way what is called for can be enjoyed. Your way nothing is enjoyed. I guess I can agree to disagree but I did want to point that out. Another point (minor). 500 kbps is not slow enough to do much good anyway. A setting of around 200 kbps might help. Turn on your statistic bar and watch that bandwidth meter while you TP around, spin your camera or walk in a texture rich environment. Set your max to as high as you want. See how many spikes you get above around 800 kbps..........not many. Then take note of where the meter settles.......around 50 to 100 is what I see most of the time. The setting on that meter is just telling the servers how fast your computer can recieve data. That is not telling the servers to send that much data......only what your computer and connection can handle. The servers will only send what the load at that given instant will allow to be sent. If you have a slow connection and use a lot of outside services and you set the bandwidth to a high setting you will get packet loss if the servers send that spike of 800 kbps. Once that spike is sent and things settle down to the normal 100 k or so your packet loss goes away. I see no reason to ever set the bandwidth more than 1500 kbps. 500 k is actually pretty good for most people (I started leaving mine at 500 k and I see absolutely no difference from when I had it set at 1500). I'm done with this conversation. It's an old one and you have yet to convince me that slowing the speed down will save usage.......not on a monthly basis anyway.

No you can't get the email of your friends from LL. Unless the people gave it to you before you lost contact there's no way to find that email address (it's LL's privacy policy..........and it's a good one). What you can try is to send them an IM inworld. Hopefully they will have their IM's set to send to their email. Ask them to contact you. And the person can answer the email they recieve and it will go to your IM (and email if you have your IM's setup that way)>

Setting your bandwidth in preferences does little (actually close to nothing) to control bandwidth usage. If your ISP has your service capped at a specific amount of bandwidth used you have to find a way to stop or slow the total bits and bytes uploaded or downloaded to your computer. Setting the bandwidth meter in preferences only slows (or speeds) the flow.......not the total usage. Think of your bathtube. Say your bathtube holds 50 gallons of water and your fausett is turned on to a rate of 1 gallon a minute............it will take 50 minutes to fill the tube. Turn that fausett down to a pint a minute it will take 400 minutes to fill (8 pints equal 1 gallon). If your cap is set to 50 gallons then you can choice to take 50 minutes (a little less than an hour) or 400 minutes (a little less than 7 hours). In the end you still have used 50 gallons of water. To lessen your bandwidth usage you need to limit what is uploaded and downloaded. Set your draw distance to the minimum. Set your graphics to low. Turn off particles. Don't use voice. Don't use media. Basically do nothing in SL. 20 GB is not much.........maybe limit your SL usage to a couple days a week until you figure out how much you are using then increase the time as you learn how much to expect for each hour of use. Be careful about TP'ing around the grid (that causes your viewer to call for more data to be downloaded........increasing your usage).

Well when everything you see and experience in SL is housed on remote servers, how much bandwidth would you say is acceptable? If you want 2D graphics on a simple background (like those Zingo games on Facebook) you don't need a lot of bandwidth to run the games. Make all that 3D (meaning that flat object in Zingo suddenly has a front, back, right side, left side and everything in between) the bandwidth needed for your computer to display increases dramatically. Throw in the fact that all that content is dynamic (it changes as objects within your field of view come and go constantly)......it gets pretty heavy on the bandwidth requirement to show all that stuff. If you have a connection of around 5 mbps your brother should not see much of a difference. If you are on a DSL connection you will probably see problems with concurrent SL usage (or your brother might see some slowing on his computer). It's a pretty complex system..........and it takes huge amounts of data to display what is in SL. Large amounts of data require large amounts of banwidth to get loaded to your computer. It's the nature of the beast....no way around it.

The card will run SL. But you asked if it will run SL decently.........that's a very difficult question to answer since "decently" for me is most likely very different from what is "decently" for you. You'll be able to run SL at low settings without too much difficulty (but, even then, you'll experience more lag than what I would say is "decent"). It ranks pretty low in the Class 3 video adapters (barely better than on chip or onboard graphics accellerators). It's an entry level gaming computer (and, in my opinion, that's optimistic) meant for low demanding games..........SL is by no stretch of the imagination a low demanding game. http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6470M.43075.0.html On a recommendation. In that $500 USD range for a laptop you just won't find a computer that is capable of running SL at much better than low settings (unless you go with a refurb or used computer......which I would never recommend). To get a laptop that will perform well in SL you'll have to up that budget to just about $1000 USD.

Launch your viewer but don't log in. Under the "Help" menu click on "About Second Life". Copy the specs shown on the first tab of the dialog box and then come back here, open your thread and use the "Options" in the upper right hand corner of your post and click on "Edit". Paste the specs and any other comments you might want to add. Without the specs anyone giving any help is just whistling in the dark. You must help people for people to be able to help you. Let's just say your car won't start and you call a local mechanic and say "My car won't start. What's wrong?" Then hang up..........think you'll get much help?

As a premium member you can own as much mainland as you want. What will change is your tier (call it land use fee or tax). For anything over the first 512 square meters of mainland you own you pay a fee monthly. Explained here: http://secondlife.com/land/pricing.php You can save money by paying quarterly or yearly instead of monthly like you appear to be paying. $9.95 USD monthly works out to be $119.40 a year.......quarterly at $22.50 every three months works out to $90.00 a year (saving you $29.40 a year).........and the yearly fee is $72.00 which saves you $47.40 a year. That savings can go a long way toward paying for the land you might own that is above the first 512 meters (which is free).

What ever the problem was, I'm glad it's all good now........hope it stays that way. And, I would like to thank you for the update on your issue. Almost no one does that which leaves everyone wondering what the problem was and how it was fixed (though it does seem to have "corrected" itself......which, in a way, does give some insight to what the original problem was. In this case, it seems it was LL's issue).

"... Is there away I can get in, or is there no hope?..." ------------------------------------ Probably. But not without some computer specs so that people can take a guess at what the problem might be. Otherwise, it is probably hopeless. If you can get to the log in screen (don't even try to log in since it won't work anyway) under the "Help" menu click on "About Second Life". Your basic computer specs will be shown on the first tab of the dialog box that pops up......copy those specs and paste back here for others to see (it helps tremendously to know what you are working with so that someone can help you with your problem). Meanwhile. since you are using a laptop, if you are using a wireless connection try a wired (Cat5 Ethernet cable) instead. Because of the huge amount of data being sent and recieved by your computer wireless just isn't the best way to run SL.

In conjunction with Charolott's answer, the object may not be attached to you (in fact, since you said you rezzed it on the floor, I don't think it is attached to you). You can zoom your camera out so that you can see all of you and some of the surrounding area, then click on the object that you rezzed and either take it back to inventory or delete it (which ever you prefer). And, like Charo said, if it's invisible hit "Alt-Cntrl-T" to highlight transparencey.......anything that has transparency will show with a red semi-transparency "glow". It might be a little hard to click the object but keep trying until you select it then just take or delete. I've done something similar before. I rezzed a large object (really just a large cube) too close to where I was standing and it rezzed around me..........it trapped me just like you. That is actually the basis for "cages" that are sometimes used as griefing objects. Other ways to get out of the trap are to find something you can sit on that is outside the object and sit on it. Or you can TP to somewhere else and come back (as long as you don't TP back to the same location.....maybe TP to a neighboring sim and walk to fly back to where the object is located. And you can log out then log into the neighboring sim and walk or fly to the object.

You said you could TP to some places but not others. I'm wondering if those places you can TP to are G rated sims and if the sim you are apparently stuck on is also G rated. It sounds like you are not 18 years old and because of that you are restricted to G rated areas..........I'm not saying that is the case, I'm saying that is what it sounds like from your discription of the problem. Check your preferences to see if you might have accidentally checked the "I want to visit" options to only include G sims instead of G, M, (and maybe A). Or something might have happened to cause the the choices to change (like maybe a crash recently). If you were able to access M and A sims before there is no reason you should not be able to do so now unless something changed. You might try a clean install of the viewer of choice........uninstall each viewer you have installed on your system and after you've uninstalled all of them do a complete computer search for anything Second Life or SL and manually delete the files found (if you want to save any chat logs save them with a different name before you delete those files). Don't save any preference settings though (you'll have to re-do those after you've deleted them). Then download and install the viewer your prefer to use (but install one) and try SL again. If that fixes the problem then you can download and install other viewers if you want (but move the caches for the other viewers to a different location on your computer......a second drive or partition is ideal). That's about all I can think of........if that doesn't work then a support ticket is in order. It's unlikely but it could be a server issue for your account.

I don't know why anyone would want to log in and be invisible. I can think reasons of why someone would want to log in and it not be known to others (friends, enemies, or work related reasons) but not "invisible" in that no one can see your avatar at all. If you are wanting to log in and it not be known to others that you know or hang around with then just created an Alt........and don't tell anyone about it. That way no one you know or who might know you will know you are online. You'd be "invisible" to them but not really invisible to the world. No green dot, listed as offline in your groups and in search. Very effective (just don't let it be known who the alt is and don't join the same groups).

"...does anyone have the answer for me." ------------------------------------------------------------ Probably not........not without some computer specs anyway. Launch your viewer (no need to log in) and under the "Help" menu click on "About Second Life". You'll see the basic computer specs for your computer.....copy and paste those back here for others to see so that they can help you. Don't start a new thread......use the "Options" in the upper right hand corner of your post and "Edit" to add the specs and any other comments you might think will help. Of the top of my head since this is a new computer it's likely a driver issue for your graphics adapter.......or it may be that your graphics are not quite able to display SL due to being low powered. Remember Windows 8 is a new operating system...new operating systems often have issues with programs. It takes time for those issues to be found and corrected. I never jump into a new OS.........I found waiting for a year or so (at least until problems are no longer being reported) before even considering moving to it. I refuse to be an unpaid beta tester for a program I paid good money for..........I expect things to work reasonably well if I gave a company like Microsoft $200 USD for an operating system. It might sound selfish but I'll let others do that beta testing for me.

File an abuse report. Include the time (at least the approximate time) it occurred, where it occurred and the name of the person making the threat. If you have the chat logs put them in there too. It's usually best to do the AR at the time the incident occurred or as close to the time as possible.........but it appears you did not do that. That does not mean Linden Lab cannot investigate but it makes it easier for the investigation (a lot goes on every second in Second Life so LL's logs are huge and without information it's nearly impossilbe to find the exact logs so that they can make an informed judgement). Everything that goes on in SL is logged by LL so they can search for and find the appropriate logs.......but the longer you wait the harder it is to find those logs. And, it appears the person making the extortion demand was unsuccessful LL might see this as a low priority complaint.........but if it happens again you have both the AR you filed plus the new one. And if you file the AR at the time the incident is taking place LL can get right to the log, verify what happened and take action. You may have to endure this person and his/her demands again. Just don't give in.........and don't tell the person that you are filing the AR (let them find out from LL that a complaint has been made). On that threat of reporting you. If you did nothing wrong the logs will show that.......don't worry about it. Just smile to yourself as you file the AR and move on with your SL fun. You might also consider finding a better place to hang out if this is a regular thing with these people.

There is no email link for technical support (actually no email link for any Second Life support services). You get your support (technical or any other support) by submitting a support ticket. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-contact-customer-support/ta-p/739385 The only "exception" for support services is billing. Linden Lab has billing support via telephone 24/7 (you do not need to be premium for billing support via phone). https://support.secondlife.com/billing-support/

"... t is a rare instance that it turns out to be something that needs to be fixed on Linden Labs end with the exception of region crossings which they are working hard to fix. Second Life is a complex system. Why it is hard for people to understand this is something I don't understand. It takes a minimum of thought to figure this out. I'm not the smartest kid on the block and I figured it out." ---------------------------------------- Watch, Perrie. You'll get a reputation of being a Linden Lab lacky like me. But I do agree with you..........except maybe the 99% thing. I'm thinking it's more like 98.9% (we got to be accuate now. ).

Everything Echo mentioned is true. A nearly full hard drive will cause many problems, especially with programs that use a lot of system memory (RAM. which Second Life is one such program. But I have a couple questions that I'm sure will help others (and me) think of what might be the reason for your problems. The only thing I know for sure right now is that Vista is not the problem (as said by Echo). My first question. You said SL was "erased" from your program files. I hope by "erase" my mean that it was "uninstalled". Erasing a program is different than uninstalling a program. When you erase any file (program, video, audio, image or document) only the markers leading to the file are removed (the file still exists but Windows simply sees it as available space for more files and/or programs that can be used). None of the markers pointing to registry files are removed. Those registry files are still seen by Windows as valid pointers.......but they point to files that Windows sees as "empty". Finding those eroneous registry entries can be a huge headache........but as long as they are there, they can (and often do) cause problems. Unless you are very comfortable with working in your system's registry it's best to leave it to experts (a computer repair facility.....not Best Buy's Geek Squad though). There are programs available for free that will clean up glaring registry errors such as CCleaner ( http://www.piriform.com/ ). But that will only fix the most common and obvious errors.......not all of them. Try it......it's a good and safe program to use. But remember, it will not fix major problems with the registry. My other question is that you said you've had SL for years. What viewer are you trying to use now? You could have been using the very old SL viewer 1.23 (or one of the older third party viewers based on the 1.23 viewer code). That viewer does not support the newer SL features but it is very much easier on the load your computer has to deal with when using SL. For instance, if you were using a viewer that was based on the 1.23 code and now are trying to use a viewer based on the SL viewer 3.xx code, the demands are significantly higher now than before..........your video card may not support the features available in with the viewer you are using. System specs, again as Echo mentioned, are critical for help in that regard. Meanwhile it might be time for some system maintenance. Do a disk clean-up (CCleaner is very good for that), clean out any unnecessary software installed on your computer (don't just delet or erase them.....use the uninstall utility), move as much of those treasures as you can (pictures, videos, music, love letters, etc) to either another drive or removable media then delete them from the drive that your operating system and SL reside on. Next, do a defrag of your compture's drive.......that can take a very long time (especially if you've never done it before or it's be a long since the last defrag) so pick a time when you won't need your computer for other stuff for several hours. Right now that's about all I can come up with for you.

I'm a naturally shy person in real life and that shyness carried over into SL when I first joined (many years ago........LOL). I spent almost all my time wandering around by myself and almost never spoke to anyone (aside from an accidental meeting of who became my best friend in SL which progressed to a RL friendship since we lived less than 10 away from each other). Sometimes I would say "Hi" and get nothing back, or maybe a simple "Hi" back..........but it was always the "now what?" after saying "Hi". My accidental friend is somewhat of an extrovert (which is why I got to know her........I would never have initiated a conversation on my own) and I watched and listened to how she met people. She always found something to say after the "Hi".......even if it was just "Darn, my typing is miserable" (which may or may not have been true..............it was just an opening to say something else). I took her cue and started throwing out silly, non threatening chit chat............and it worked. People started talking to me. You just need something to say after you "meet" someone. And from that little change in my initial encounter with people I learned about clubs and events from those new aquaintances.....they gave me landmarks to clubs and told me to check them out. I started doing that and using my friends silly none sense chit chat got to be part of the group.....once that happens it's easy to talk about most anything (I don't get serious in SL so it was all silly stuff...........which most people feel comfortable with so "friendships" were made and groups were joined. That took me about a couple months to get to that point.........and it's been uphill since then. A very good venue to explore is life music events. The people attending those events are about the most friendly I've found in SL. The singers are extremely friendly, their group members are so enthusiastic that it's contagious. Not to mention that you get to hear some very good music and singing...........any genre. Give it a shot.

I've never seen an option for "lossless compression" in the upload window. First off, any "compression" is going to entail some loss.......if it's compressed, it reduced in bit/byte size which means something is lost. Second, any texture or image uploaded to SL is compressed.......every single texture or image is compressed to the JPEG2000 format. You cannot avoid that compression as all formats (JPEG, BMP, PNG and TGA) are converted to the JPEG2000 format (and compressed at that point). What you can avoid (and if you are concerned about texture/image quality you should do) by never saving any portion of your texture to a lossy format during it's creation or editing process. Once you save it to a lossy format the quality is lost and there's not way to retrieve it. Work in lossless formats from beginning to end.....JPEG is the only lossy format I listed so stay away from that format like the plague. The format of choice for me is TGA......and my textures/images only encounter that single compression at upload (I can do no more to insure the best quality). On the temporary texture upload I have no idea if you can still do that. I know some TPV's had that capability (Phoenix?) but the official SL viewers never did. I can understand if LL changed the server code to prevent temporary textures from being uploaded (server load ect) but, as far as I know, LL hasn't done so.

I'm going to take a stab at this. First I think Nalates misread your post (or maybe I'm misreading it.........I could be wrong). As I understand it you are launching the viewer and getting a blank screen. A blank screen could be a black screen but you did not say that.......you said "blank". Every time I've seen a "blank" screen it's be a white screen.......all white with nothing else. You also mentioned that you had a border around the blank screen. Those two tidbits of information give me the impression that your viewer has successfully launched but the log in screen has not been retrieved from the SL servers. The log in screen is just a web page that the viewer calls up for you to log into SL. It seems you are not getting that log in screen so that you can log in. That could mean that you have a browser problem..........the web browser you use by default (be it IE, Firefox, Chrome or any other browser) is just not getting the information from the servers. Try using a different browser.........such as Chrome or Firefox if you are using IE (remember to make it the default so that the viewer will use it instead of what is currently associated). Another thing you didn't mention is if you have any menus available when you get the "blank" screen. You said you have a border so I'm wondering if in that border you have a "Me" menu, "Help" menu, and "Debug" menu. Those menus are shown on the log screen at the top left of the screen (in that "border"). If you do have those menus, click on the "Me" menu and on the "Setup" tab you'll see a choice to use either your external browser (IE, Chrome, Firefox, ect) or the internal browser (the built-in browser for the viewer). Which ever is checked change it and try to launch SL again. You do not have to log in to make that change. And while you are at it click on the "Help" menu and then "About Second Life". You'll see the basic computer specs that the viewer reports to the servers......copy and paste those back here (that is what Nalates was asking for from you). I doubt the installation location for SL makes any difference. I'm sure your Win7 installation is on the SSD which will take most of the available storage space.......you may not even have room on that drive for SL. I have SL on drive D on my other computer and it works just fine.

It's the different templates that skin makers have to deal with. The head and upper torso templates are at different sizes which makes it near impossible to match the textures perfectly........which, when resized to the 512 x 512 texture size, causes the pixels to be either jammed tighter or spread out. The color and detail for the two different textures don't match up like you would expect them to. The problem also exists for the upper template and the lower template (and even for the front to back of those two templates (though to a much less noticible degree due to the sizes are not nearly as different as the head template to the upper template. Some skin makers are better at it than others, but if you look closely at even the best of the skins you'll see it. By the way, it looks like the skin maker knows about the problem and softened the difference by blurring the edges a bit. That only works to a point though........blur too much and you get a drastic difference in the texture detail. I've played with varying the tone to try to make it better but l've not had a lot of success (where it makes it "better" it makes it look artificial (almost cartoonish). The darker toned skins seem to show the problem more for me.......lighter skins don't show it so much.

I'm afraid you are not going to find a solution for your problem as long as your computer has the GMA 945 Express Chipset. Intel eliminated the on motherboard intergrated accellerators about 2 years ago and moved the intergrated graphics accellerators to the CPU chipsets. Technology has out run your computer's ability to "keep up". -------------------------------------------- History Before the introduction of Intel HD Graphics, Intel integrated graphics were built into the motherboard's northbridge. This included Intel Extreme Graphics and the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator. As part of the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) design, the northbridge was eliminated, and graphics processing was moved to the central processing unit (CPU). In January 2010, the Clarkdale and Arrandale processors were released with HD Graphics, and branded as Celeron, Pentium, or Core. In January 2011, the Sandy Bridge processors were released introducing the "second generation" HD Graphics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_Graphics --------------------------------------------------------- About the only thing you can do is find the most recent driver for the GMA 945 and install it.......hope for the best (but I doubt it's going to work well, if it works at all). It's a good idea to go to your computer manufacturer for the driver instead of Intel's driver download site (many laptop manufacturers require customized drivers for the specific computer the graphics adapter is installed in.......read the "Driver FAQ's" before you update or install any driver for Intel intergrated graphics). You can also remove Windows 8 and go back to Windows 7...........but the problem with that is that installing a newer driver under Windows 8 will likely cause problems on Windows 7 unless you recorded the driver version before you updated it. That will allow you to go back to the driver that worked before you started switching drivers around (few people do that but it should always be done before making any driver change).

The "white puff cloud" you (and others) see as their avatar has nothing to do with your operating system (nor your graphics card). It's related to your connection to the Second Life servers. Something is not making the round trip to and from your computer. The fix is finding where that connectiion problem originates doing what is required to resolve the issue. A good starting place in to reboot your router and modem. Simply unplug them from their electrical source, wait 3 to 5 minutes then plug them back in. It's usually a good idea to reboot your computer after doing that to re-establish your Internet.

You asked why LL doesn't act. With a name like that (and I'm sure it's a display name and not a user name) LL will act. But only if they are made aware of the issue........the name alone is enough for LL to do something (if nothing else, remove the display name and possibly suspend the user). However, it must be reported.........properly. When you file the Abuse Report be sure to include a "snapshot" with the report and have your camera looking at the person wearing that name (I refuse to type the word but you know who I'm talking about). That way the Linden responsible for handling that AR will see the display name and, due to the hateful nature of the name, be obligated to look into the problem. Also when making your report be sure to give as many details as possible but stick to facts only.......don't imbellish the report (LL has access to the server logs and if your claims match what is on the logs then something can be done.......if your claims are exaggerated, most likely LL will toss the AR). From experience I know the AR system works........but only for legitamate violations. If your claims can't be backed up with server logs then nothing is going to happen. Fill out the report but be honest and as thorough as possible.