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I’m going to cover three topics: your connection, your hardware and how work the strangers in
Second Life. The first of these topics is connection issues.
Now you are going to want to use a broadband connection – not wireless.
If you have a wireless laptop, don’t use the wireless function.
Also, you might have some firewall issues. When you try to log in to Second Life you
see the bar crossing the black screen. If you get an error before the bar crosses
and you cannot connect you will know that you have a firewall issue.
And you either have to go to another network or work with the server administrator to have
the server administrator open access on your network.
But the most common problems you encounter here is with your hardware.
I want to show you how to check your system. The front of the Second Life web site has
a link to system requirements and they break it in to PCs and Macs,
also what is required and what is suggested. You can see them here.
So let’s start for Macintosh users checking which graphics card you have and compare against
the system requirements. Go ahead and click on the Apple in the top
left of the screen and choose “about this Mac.”
You’ll see the processor and memory here. Click “More info” to see the graphics
card. Click “Graphics/Displays” and you’ll
see the chipset model. That does it for the Macintosh.
For the Windows machines, you actually have two things that you can do and I’ll go over
those now. First, right click on your desktop and choose
“Properties” from the tab that pops up. You get the display settings box and you can
see the graphics card listed in the display field.
Okay, that’s the first way to do this on a PC. The second way is a little bit more
technical. Click on the “Start” button and choose
run. In the run dialogue type the letters “dxdiag” and hit “Ok”.
And now you’ll see the DirectX Diagnostic Tool which shows the processor and memory.
Click on the “Display” tab and you will see the graphics card listed there.
Now, because Second Life is a public space to some degree, You may find yourself interacting
with people who are not polite. So I want to tell you what you can do here if you find
yourself in that situation. So there are really four courses of action
that I could propose to you.
The first is to ignore the person, so there are a number of ways on Second Life that you
can turn off voice or turn off chat from that particular person.
The second thing you can do is click on the map tab and teleport somewhere else.
Finally what you can do is just stop your browser, close your browser out and if you
want to you can relog back in.