it doesnt look, work and feel properly

hey guys,
so i'm new to sl, basicly wanted to try it because you read so much about it and once i saw it on lifechurch.tv i just wanted to check out their church. i also saw that frankfurt was in this game too, and i've been there so wanted to see how it'd look in a virtual world.

thing is, everything looks really messed up, i see nearly no people and i can't edit my haircut?!

i've tried running it on low, but i'm running it on ultra now... there wasn't that much of a difference and i know my pc should be able to handle this on ultra (p4 3ghz 2gb ram 7600gs). i'm an IT student and i don't even know why the game wont work propperly, haha!
http://i42.tinypic.com/kagq4h.jpg heres a screenshot
i guess its just textures taking a crapload of time to load, but it has nothing to do with my internet connection. (i'm not downloading anything while playing)

i hope i can fix this so i can run it properly. i've been really bored lately so i can't wait, haha.

edit: let me add i have 8mbps internet and am on a wired router and modem.

thanks in advance,
California Goldshark (lmao i love that name)

The grey stuff is where textures haven't downloaded yet. In SL, textures work kind of like images on a Web page; they aren't stored in the viewer software ahead of time because the objects are built by the users instead of the company.

Unfortunately, there has been a big problem lately with slow loading textures. On top of that, the entire grid has been suffering overloading for the past few weeks, so you are ind of seeing things at their worst

oh that kind of sucks doesn't it... so theres nothing i can do? and what will linden labs do?

They are working on lots of small and large things to try and get the situation tamed. The next viewer version will be swatting a pile of small bugs that accumulated over the past year or so, that conspired to make the texture problem worse. the server side stuff is being beefed up in the short term, and whole portions of the system will be facing rewrites. But hopefully the new viewer version will at least get us back down to tolerable

i hope so i really want to play this game lol

To make textures load faster, you can decrease the draw distance in Preferences; unless you are in a fantastic landscape sim, 100m is usually fine. In really laggy areas such as malls, I reduce to 64m. This will drastically reduce the number of textures SL is trying to download at once.

You can also increase SL's bandwidth usage under Preferences.