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I am searching for an SL viewer that is portable and will run under windows. A viewer that can be unpacked or installed from a normal account. In other words, without using an admin account. I don't mind if it run slower. I will need to install without admin privileges. ideally the viewers can be config'ed to keep cache and settings on the jump drive. TIA

In this quick guide I'll try to show you how to set up a ram disk for second life. I hope that this helps those who are telling me that now rezzing in world is somehow slow. This guide supposes that your pc has enough ram to do it. Remember that now windows 10 can use almost 3GB ram so you need at least 8GB ram even better a system with 16GB ram ( that is now the standard for most pc's of middle range).The size of the ram disk for SL and maybe cache of your browser( this is another chapter not discussed here) is just 2GB more and less. I also recommend you to disable windows automatic update for graphic drivers and stuff Keep just the updates for patches and security but don't make your windows mess the drivers of your boards and pheripherals(this might be another reason what some people can see a sudden slowness in windows 10 after updating it: it has the bad habit to update drivers of your boards too without asking you ). Windows 10 after Vista is the dumbest piece of software ever written, they made it too much automatic, forgetting always that computers are powerful but dumb, it's the brain behind them making them useful and smart. I recommend you to follow this guide here to mitigate a few this iussue that can mess up your graphic driver and other drivers of your boards and peripherals. have you ever been in your office and been screaming because a fax and a printer and other stuff all of sudden stopped working with an update of windows 10? Well that's the reason.Another hint is when you install graphic driver for your card just avoid all that useless stuff, if you don't use it drop the telemetry and audio drivers included in graphic drivers package, run a custon installation instead. For Nvidia I never install all the useless stuff but just graphic driver and physics. Many people now have already got the m2 ssd that are superb comparing their performances to the classic SSD ( Slc ,Tlc, Mlc). However their price is not always affordable , not all the residents have an hardware supporting it or just want to keep their heat away from a small case. In all of these cases to speed up your programs you can use your ram and a handy trick by then by Xp times and that still now has very decent scores. To do this first of all we need to use a program to create a ram disk if in windows. If you use linux ambient then it's a way easier : you don't need external stuff. Just follow the guide here For windows we have a few softwares that can do the trick you can choice the one that you like the most among these. I like a lot soft perfect ram disk (however it's no more free). To use the free version you must download an older version from this site. Bear in mind that it works great with windows 7, but with windows 10 because of some changes now you can allocate no more than 4 GB per each ram disk(which is still more than enough to run SL from it).However among the ones showed in the site I proposed are very good to be free, that you can download from here as older version. To create your ram disk it's very quick and intuitive most of the proposed programs above have a short guide and a very intuitive interface.Just remember when you create it to use an NTFS file system . Here I leave for you a visual example of configuring a 2 GB ram disk, using soft perfect ram disk. Anyway more and less all of them have such a simple and intuitive interface.Select the letter of your ram disk, select the size, select the file system and click ok.Then the new ram disk appears among all the other disks.The pc won't make any difference with the others but the write/read speed would be so far faster than SSD, as you can also see from the benchmarks posted in the site I linked above. Once created the ram disk we need to move to the step two which is making a portable app of our SL (this works good for all the viewers like the classic SL viewer and others that don't force you to download the files using the executable. in that case you can still avoid to install them tricking their pity way to get installed using a virtual machine and then copy the files, but this is another chapter). So download SL viewer and use a free software like 7zip to unpack it to a folder .Done this you can even customize that folder copying in its paths the xml files for windlight or some fonts that you might miss in the classic sl and want to take from other viewers. Alright done now you have it customized and ready to be zipped again to be kept on your disk as a "portable app" to copy to your ram disk any time you create it. Before we launch SL we don't want it to make mess in our folders either, like for many other programs you can move the settings folders elsewhere too. To do this we use a trick that comes handy with any other painting software or 3d software or games :we are going to use a Junctions. This is a way to decept our windows system and let it belive that the folders are still on our main disk while truly they're located on our scratch disk. Ok let's start our deception Sl has some folders located to this path C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Roaming C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Local If you don't see those folders it might be because your system is not showing you hidden folders. Enable it from your folders options in control panel. here is one of the ways to do it now it's time to create our new paths for our sl settings folders. This will help to keep the OS disk (especially if it's an ssd clean and not fragmented). Let's imagine that our scratch disk is named M: Fine let's create in our M disk a folder that will allow us to keep handy all the files we'll move and call it whatever you like for instance mysettingsl. now within this folder (mysettingssl) we move one after another the sl folders that we have in our C:...Roaming and in our C:...Local folders. How to? My hint for you is to have visible the adress bar in your windows folder. If you don't follow this 1) Open File Explorer. Click the View tab on the ribbon. You’ll see the the Options button on the right-hand side. Click it to open the Folder Options dialog. 2) Click the View tab. Locate and tick the checkbox named “Display the full path in the title bar Now open a Note and keep it on your windows ( in this note we will copy and paste the original and the final locations of our folders, just to keep them handy). So move to the path C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife From the adress bar of the window copy the adress and paste it in your note. Now cut the folder "SecondLife" located in C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Roaming\ then Paste it in the folder of your M: scratch dsk that we called (mysettingssl) in your M disk navigate to the SecondLife folder just pasted there and from the adress bar copy it's path it will look like something like this M:\mysettingssl\SecondLife Now time to get our hands dirty a bit with the command prompt (launch with administrator rights). mklink /J “C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife” “M:\mysettingssl\SecondLife” Here is where the Note where copied and pasted folders locations from the adress bar will come handy now; instead of typing them all you just paste them when you run the mkdisk command The syntax and the logic is always the same anytime you want to use this command so: mklink /J "C:\the original path" "M:\the new path" where M can be any other of your disks for scratch or partitions (or even a ram disk if you decide to move there also those folders and save the whole ram disk created as an iso to launch each time avoiding to use a scratch disk for settings too). If you did the command well you will read in your command prompt something like this: Junction created for C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife <====>M:\mysettingssl\SecondLife and in your folder "Roaming" located in C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Roaming\ you will see the icon od SecondLife folder appearing with the short curvy arrow meaning itìs now a junction.the system still belives that it's there, but physically it's not there. Now repeat the same steps also to move the second life folder that you have in in your C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Local in your scratch disk M go to the folder you created and named "mysettingssl" within it create another folder named like "Sllocal" or whatever you wish and move there with the Junction method I showed above the SecondLife folder that you see in C:\Users\your_pc_account_name\AppData\Local. In our Ram disk let's create a folder and call it for instance cache (or whatever you like for SL cache). Done now we just need to move to our Ram disk ,once created it , and copy there our zipped "portable secondlife app" then unpack it in our ram disk. Assuming that you call your ram disk something like N: Make a link of your SecondLifeViewer.exe (that is in your second life folder unzipped in your ram disk) by right mouse click menu and paste it somewhere in your ram disk. now right click on the file you just pasted named for instance "SecondLifeViewer.exe - link" go to properties and where you read "destination " we will specify some paramethers to force the cache to our ram disk most of those commands are shown in the wiki page of sl that you find here. In our case we just neeed a simple string like this. --set CacheLocation N:/cache --set NewCacheLocation N:/cache (if the ram disk you created has a different letter change N with the chosen letter for your ram disk paste this string after the SecondLifeViewer.exe in the destination path of the secondlife.exe - link properties window, that you just created. That destination pat in that window will look like something like this N:\Second_Life_6_2_4_529638_x86_64_Setup\SecondLifeViewer.exe --set CacheLocation N:/cache --set NewCacheLocation N:/cache (don't forget the space between SecondLifeViewer.exe and the string you created to force your cache there and to specify cache paths in parameters use the slash instead of backslash, like in the example above). If you want as a trick to not repeat this anytime you start your pc you could move to your ram disk also the settings folders that in the example above I showed you how tomove to a scratch physical disk. Then save the whole ram disk as an iso file to load by your ram disk program. bear in mind each time you update sl viewer you may need to refresh the iso putting there the new version of your "zipped portable sl". Now you're running your second life and its cache and settings from a ram disk. Ok the short lecture is done I hope you didn't fall asleep. Coucou