A few niggly things...

1)
I was playing in the sandbox the other night practicing my building, when someone commenced flying around me on some machine that spewed out black stars which i pressume was meant to be 'smoke'. Yes, I know sandbox is a testing type place for things, but this 'thing' was littering theplace with a blanket of black slop! I zoomed out as much as i could and noticed that he had covered the entire SIM with the black crap! and it didn't just fade away within a few seconds, it lingured for atleast about minutes. It was impossible to see anything but black, so I just had to packup and not bother with building practice that night.
My only worry with this is that i hope the person that did it does not bring this stuff through the rest of the SL world. Okay, i suppose its ok if he was just testing it in sandbox, if so, im sorry for complaining, but if annoying animations expelled from machines (or even purposely done by a 'grief' player) continue, will the SL team be about to notice this and perhaps stop that particular action?

2)
It is most probably my own computer, but lag is getting very bad, particulary in busy places. I live in Northern Ireland, could this be a problem? Sometimes when i'm just casually flying about, everything vanishes, all i see is grey bellow me, around me, heck sometimes even i turn grey (lol, if this continues i'll probably turn grey in RL! Lol, no thats just a jk). I usually just stand stationary for a few mins to let everything catch up.
In future updates, will there be any enhancements made to the client to help the lag?

3)
The places in SL are becoming more and more like an RPG. I see medevle castles, volcanoes, lava motes and strange buildings spurting out green stuff and smoke which i presume is meant to be a power station. I know this is a game where players create their own world, but it is called 'Second LIFE' which to me means it's similar to Real Life but it's just a different one (if that makes sence).

I really do sound like an old Grinch moaning away here lol!
These points i've raised doesn't mean i don't like the game, because I do. It's just that these are the little things that niggle me when i'm in a ratty mood.

PS...
To all the people who have installed elevators in their homes and shops... I LOVE YOU ALL!!! They are great, lol, they fascinate me
And one more thing, i also like the skyscrapers built by people, although most of them don't seem to have anything in them...

Okay, thanks for reading my post
Bye
Alan

1) File an abuse report and let the Lindens handle it
2) North Ireland is pretty far from California, don't hold your breath for lag fixes.
3) Yea it's surreal.

3) I aggree, but you have to understand, SL gives you the power to do basically anything that you want. Some people use that to their advantage, and build "medevle castles, volcanoes, lava motes and strange buildings spurting out green stuff and smoke".

And... niggly? Man, I havent heard that one in a while...

lol Niggly Yea, i'm quite frustrated today and that word just wiggled out of my brain and down to my fingers.

I'm very annoyed today (once again, here i go, at it again) but i have continueally attempted teleporting to different places but to no avail. On top of that, I cannot land at several places. I just sink throught the ground and bounce along for as long as I leave the program running. I've tried to restart the client etc and it always happens at any place with more than 5 people at it. I've only been playing for a few days now yet i havn't really had much fun. Perhaps SL isn't the game for me.

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I had that happen to me once. It was pretty amusing at the time. I do see how it would a major pita to have it happening all the time.

Uh, there were castles, volcanoes and one heck of a lot weirder builds in beta.
I kinda miss the weirdness of it all.

Often, the lag you experience is due to the last mile of internet connecting to your computer. Everything else is fairly well unified and fast, barring internet-wide events like worm gestations or major outages. Pure distance from the Linden Lab server location in California will increase LATENCY, but that isn't nearly as noticable. (Though you may find yourself having more difficulty stopping your avatar on a dime than someone actually IN California.)

Lag, when it's not Server-lag (bad scripts, too many avatars in one place, physics bomb) is almost always due to either your ISP or your own computer's processing power. If it's sporadic, it's probably the ISP. (Internet Service Provider)

That has happened to me and I believe its definitely a packet loss / latency issue.

As to your points:

1) Just a tip to alleviate that problem: If it is particles they were spewing out you can shut off particle display in various ways, try (shift -alt-=)

2) The others covered that pretty well

3) I don't think you've explored SL very completely. There are a wide range of builds from the most mundane modern houses to the most outlandish fantasies. Personally, I prefer the more imaginative builds and get pretty bored with recreations of everyday life. We have this world with limitless possibilities - why should we put artificial constraints on what we build? The fantastical and dreamlike things in SL are what I love most. I can build things that would be totally impractical to build in RL and that's part of the appeal. And I love the volcanoes and such. In my opinion that kind of content is a thousand times more interesting than yet another beach house with a pool, or a nightclub. But if that's what you want there is plenty of that if you look around a bit.

The lag you're experiencing in busy crowds is almost certainly not strictly network-related. It's likely your computer's fault. Because of the nature of the world and the type of rendering engine used, SL requires extremely powerful and high-capacity computers to run at an acceptable rate.

Your avatar turning grey, or textures being fuzzy -- that generally means you don't have enough video RAM. Make sure it's set to the maximum available setting in Preferences > Options > Video Card Memory. (Ctrl-P)

What are your make and model of CPU, motherboard, video card and RAM? I can offer some suggestions on what's likely to be the largest bottleneck in your system. Believe it or not, it's almost definitely not your network connection.

That said, your issues with waiting for the world to load probably ARE related to your network settings, but it's possible that you just need to turn up your network capacity. (Preferences > Network > Maximum Bandwidth.) Also, while you're in there, increase your disk cache to 1000MB.

Thanks for the help guys, i'll tweak those setting now when I go ingame.
Lol, i was a bit grouchy yesterday but its all ok today, going to get a new computer soon and hopefully it should cure my problems with SL.

Thanks again for the help