I’m currently downloading new drivers for my PC. My Second Life has crashed a few times and I was reading that you should check your drivers. I hadn’t updated mine in a year or something so have downloaded the latest ones and am about to install them: nVidia nForce2, Intel Pro 100B network & nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200. Wish me luck.
I also consolidated my partitions. I had: C:, D:, E:, F:, G: now I have C:, D:, E:
Unfortunately, the partitioning program got an error twice and I had to try to recover the partitions. It didn’t work, so I lost a partition. It was my games partition and so only had a couple things on it, so no great loss. I had to reformat the lost partition. In the end, I got it all working tho. C: drive is now 20Gb instead of 10Gb.
I found a great program called PerfectDisk for defragging hard drives. I had tried running the builtin Windows XP defragger but after it ran it still looked fragged, so I clicked ANALYZE again and it told me it recommended I defrag the drive!! SHEESH!
You get a 30 day trial of PerfectDisk and that’s enough to defrag all your partitions and drives.
Now, my PC seems like it’s almost FLYING! It was laggy in it’s responsiveness, but now it’s a lot better.
I also was brutal deleting and uninstalling applications and data. I cleared off so much crap which had just been rotting on my hard drive.
I’m still having fun with Second Life. Bec tried it for a short test, but it doesn’t interest her. She’d rather go around whacking monsters in World of Warcraft or fragging people in Quake than playing a game like SL. The programming and creating interests me, tho.
I played some more SL-ingo today and my friend whom introduced SL to me (Hi EGGY!) popped on, so I invited him over to the Casino I was in. He’s not at all interested in playing games tho, preferring programming instead. I sometimes like to program and sometimes like to explore. Since I don’t know how to create/build/program in SL yet (doesn’t seem to be many detailed tutorials or documents on it) I haven’t done anything worthwhile yet. I created a cube and resized it’s sides. That’s about all I can figure out for now.
The game has what it calls ‘primitive 3d shapes’ or ‘PRIMS’ for creating whatever you wish. It doesn’t seem too intuitive tho. I can’t even figure out how to make my own clothing or skins. Guess I will have to ask around.
Eggy donated some money to our SL-ingo pot (L$500 WOO!) but early in the game, my client crashed so I missed out on being in the running for it since I missed a few rounds while restarting the client, logging on, caching the graphics and getting back to my SL-ingo card. 
Hence why I am trying to work out how to cut down on crashes.
I’ve turned off all graphics enhancements in the game since it seems to play rather laggy. Unfortunately, with a game like this, you need quite a good lot of bandwidth speed. Players can upload their own textures (for a fee of in-game money) so whenever you enter an area or even walk around in the area you are currently in, it has to constantly stream content, graphics and audio to your PC (not audio so much depending on what’s happening around). It can cache up to about 1Gig of data (selectable) but it doesn’t seem to alleviate the problem so much. I think it’s better if you live in USA or have a phat pipe to your PC. Maybe one day we will look at getting iiNet ADSL2 
I took Sienna out before lunch this morning to pick up our mail from the PO Box and do a bit of shopping. We popped into BiLo to pick up some supplies. We made Tacos tonight with some of them. I bought the new ‘flat bottom’ tacos which allow you to sit the taco up on it’s end while you fill it up. A great idea if I ever heard one 
