A Second Life OS.

Basically I've been having trouble with second life and am convinced that part of the problem is having an os in the way. I wish there was some way to load SL on the computer from disk when you start up the computer, before you load any os's. Could this be worked out somehow?

You'd have to have an OS for it to run on one way or another, to load all the drivers for all the hardware, configure networking, and so on. It would be a huge effort for no benefit.

Ok, then what about a stripped down version that could still be used for rpg/mil/shooter sims and all that. Where you can still move around and such and to everyone you appear but you dont have to load a bunch of stuff/get lagged. Would that somehow be possible?

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's got nothing to do with the OS.

Have you ever done a clean Windows Install and only put SL on the machine to see if there was a difference in your experience?

LL said a long time ago that most problems people have with SL are caused by other applications and what nots installed. I do not know how true that is, but i keep my installed programs to a minimum and a crash for me is very rare.

Briana's got a good point. I pretty much only run SL on my Wintendo, myself.

Wintendo?

The only thing I use Windows for at home is running games, because that's what Windows is best at, so I call the computer my "Wintendo".

What I would do if I was having issues is try this, after windows loads, but before you start sl push your ctrl alt delete and bring that task manager up.. go to your processes, and just end task on the explorer, then go to the new task thing on the applications tab, and start sl that way, should be c:\program files\secondlife\secondlife.exe ya kno, should have less probs.. I hope this works for you, to bring back your windows stuff just ctrl alt delete again and go to applications tab and type in explorer.exe and it will all come back. I do this sometimes anyways because it helps with preformance in and of sl. This does not close windows itself, but will get rid of all the extra stuff running usually..

That sounds different.

You might also try putting linux on your pc alongside Windows and running SL from there. Everything's faster with linux anyway, at least in my experience, since it doesn't have all the gubbins in the Windows registry to cope with, and you would be astonished -- at least I was when first I tried this, particularly if you use Henri Beauchamps' optimised Cool Viewer http://sldev.free.fr/ -- at how much better SL runs on it than on a Windows system that creaking a bit.

Worth a try, certainly.

This actually does work pretty well if you can find a version of Linux that doesn't require a degree in Computer Science to install and configure. Slax Linux was the one I tried. The problem is that a lot of the lag--most of the lag--in SL is caused by SL itself, so no matter how clean or fast your computer system is, it won't help very much. Still, any gain is a plus!

I just got hold of a copy of OpenSuse 11.1 from http://www.opensuse.org/en/ , followed the instructions for burning it to disk as an ISO image, stuck the disk in and accepted all the defaults it offered me, and let the computer do the rest.

I then had to go back to the OpenSuse site to download and install a few things separately, since their licencing terms means some components they can't distribute as part of the package -- notably the appropriate nvida driver -- but that was literally a couple of mouseclicks.

Honestly, ordinary users (like me) no more need to know all the unix command line stuff to install and run things on linux than does one need to know ms-dos to use Windows.