required download??

Building your own is pretty much always cheaper and, like you said, you can spread the expense out a bit. A lot of us don't have the know-how for that though. I have to buy something someone else built, and spend the cash all at once...given some recent unexpected expenses and now going into the holiday season, that currently just isn't feasible for me. I'm sure plenty of others are in the same boat.

Plus, you know, upgrading a year old computer which otherwise works fine just for SL seems pretty silly.

Mine is a desktop, but I can't give you the specs at the moment since I'm at work. I know everything but the graphics card meets or exceeds recommendations and the card itself meets requirements. I have considered upgrading the card, but Dell put a very low level power source in it and I'm not sure it could handle a better card.

It is pretty easy, I'll walk you through it, if you want to try. When you install SL, it puts a desktop shortcut.

Right click the shortcut, and go to PROPERTIES.

You'll see a section that says TARGET. In it, you'll see "C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" in quote, possibly with some options (preceeded by hyphens) after it. Simply add -cooperative 50 after it, so it appears like this:

"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -cooperative 50

Then click okay, and try running it. If it still overheats, repeat the process, but change the number from 50 to 100.

ALSO: IF YOU CONTINUE TO USE A NON-OFFICIAL VIEWER, BE SURE NOT TO STREAM ANY MEDIA (AUDIO, VIDEO OR WEB). That could expose your IP address to a third party, which would be necessary for the exploit as I understand it.

Regards,

-Flip

While I am a Windlight lover an stuff, I do feel bad that some folks are gonna be runnin into serious troubles cuz of this required update. I hope an alternative is found soon f'r them.

Yes it does, but I guess the difference is I deliberately spec my computer to exceed SL's requirements by a mile, well I have to or I would be replacing a perfectly good computer in 12 months time when I found the latest games wouldn't run on it.This means I do get less problems and I seem to have a good internet connection, so I'm not changing it to save myself $20 a month.
I have a working fine 950 Pentium 1 PC and a 1.8Ghz Intel PC gathering dust in the cupboard too, they will do email, forums and wordprocessing or excel, but won't run any decent games or SL. I gave them to family and they upgraded and then gave them back
Crysis and other games really make SL look like crayon drawing. Wow is an exception because it's graphics aren't that great but by doing a very good texturing job they have got around that letting it work for many less capable games machines. CoH, I used to be able to run at nearly maximum graphics settings 2 years ago on this PC, but now I am back to mid level graphics settings since upgrades have put more demand on the system, so it's not just SL doing this, one day even WoW is going to upgrade too and cheese off a lot of users.
Who knows if Vista64 doesn't play ball I might be having trouble with SL too next week, but I will install XP32 on the new machine if I have to.
And this spiral is only going to get worse I guess needing more powerful PC's and faster internet connections till LL work out a way that we stop wasting bandwidth downloading and processing the same brickwall texture everyday we login. I'd love to see a graph showing the size of the texture library and I imagine LL servers are working their butt off to find things in there too.
Maybe if we all deleted a couple of disused textures/pictures per day?

Well, I'm looking at upgrading my card and maybe tossing in a bit more memory...I'd been considering it for a few months anyway. I have to run any potential selections by my computer guru first though.

We'll see how it goes.

There's a 1.19 era client being "brought forward" by Henri Beauchamp, for Linux. I know that Boy Lane will probably release a Windows version, soon thereafter, and then there will probably be a mac version as well at some point (minue the Restrained Life patches).

I thought we were finally past all that...

The Windlight viewer with atmospheric shaders off and basic shaders on (aka the old ripple water) is 20% slower than the pre-WL viewer with ripple water (and you get the Windlight lighting changes either way even with no shader of any kind).

Even the Windlight team conceded that the *only* way the WindLight viewer will match the pre-WL viewers in performance is with *everything* turned off/down for the mid-level and below video cards which is a rather significant visual detoriation.

Elsewhere they pointed out that making the pre- and post-WL match in performance for mid-level cards was not just a priority, they expect those people to settle for SL at the 2003 visual level.

The cards in question are not mid-level, they're bottom of the barrel junk. They're lucky to get 2003 visuals on cards that would be considered mediocre at best in 2003.

A modern mid-level card will run the 1.20 viewer more than acceptably.

My card meets LL's requirements, and WL looks fine on it, but I still can't run 1.20 without overheating my computer.

And, again, the rest of my year-old system meets or exceeds LL recommendations, not just the minimum requirements.

Ann, is it possible for you to buy a new cooling system and install it? It sounds like one of the water-cooled fans would be ideal for you. The newer, bigger graphics cards ARE requiring better cooling systems.

Missed the point by about a mile.

Noone is expecting full Windlight to run on video cards that just can't handle it, the point is that running WL with pre-WL settings is quite a bit slower.

Your claim of "Windlight is the atmospheric shaders. Turn them off, and you're non-Windlight again." is false and even the Windlight team won't make the claim that WL and pre-WL are a match performance-wise at anything but degraded visual quality compared to pre-WL.

I just ordered a new card which, while still not top of the line, is about a thousand times better than the one I have...I'm going to wait until I have it installed and see how that goes before I fiddle with anything else.

The Windlight "Turned off" water, and sky become colorless, semi opaque spaces, as opposed to the pre WL versions which are the albeit cartoonish, but at least colorful version that I am quite content to have.

Right. Cooling is so dependent on the specific geometry of the case and fan locations that it's almost impossible to tell whether all the heat problems will disappear with the new graphics card, or if it will be worse. On the plus side, a lot of junk that used to be done by the CPU will instead be done by the new graphics card, so that will likely reduce the amount of heat dissipated by the CPU (and chipset, and etc.); on the downside, the graphics card itself will almost surely run much hotter, so if it's dumping that heat into a case that's inadequately ventilated, it could be time for more or different case cooling.

Coincidentally, just this past week my Linux box started shutting down from overheating. Maybe a month before, I'd noticed it was getting louder and opened the case and kinda tidied up--or so I thought. After it literally wouldn't keep running, I discovered that the area where the CPU fan contacts the fins of the heatsink was completely plugged, despite the rest of the machine being reasonably clean inside. Removing that crud, the machine is almost silent now, even with full-bore WindLight and a compile or two running in background. Yay!

I'll take your word for it, since it's been so long since I ran the pre-Windlight viewer. I don't remember there being enough of a performance hit to make me ever consider switching back.

Actually it is not a HUGE EXPLOIT. Since I never listen to music anywhere except land where I control it and I never do any other kind of media, my understanding is that it actually is not an exploit for me at all.

Be sure to disable "auto load web tabs" as well, and NEVER EVER load anyone's webtab, or click a web link or a "Load URL" dropdown from ANYONE you don't know.

There's bunches of ways to get someone's IP address, the media streams are just the easiest.

Once they can connect "LittleMe Jewell" to IP Address whatever... and they KNOW you're online, then BAM they can get ya.

(simple as placing an image in their webtab)

If they know around "when" you looked, then they can check the access logs of their webserver, and have a pretty good chance of figuring out your IP address. Easiest way to do that, would be to IM you with "Hey, I have a question".. How often do we unconsciously pop open the profile of someone who IMs us, to see who's calling? with the webtab on "auto load" the images and such will begin loading the second you open their profile.

A little social engineering goes a long way.

Through a little LSL magic, they can get your UUID, and find out if you're online, so they toss you an IM out of the blue.. and in a couple of seconds, they score your IP address, and bam, they're on their way.

After all.. how would you respond to this IM?

"Hey, Lil, I just made an alt account for "FRIENDS ONLY". Can you look at my profile and tell me what you think of the pic? This is Ann, btw."

You'd pop open that profile without a second thought... and then probably IM them a second or two before or after, saying "Ann Who?" or "I like the pic... " if you knew an Ann. Now, the theif knows WHEN you looked, and they know THAT you looked.

How safe do you feel, knowing that you just put a blinking sign on your SL account that says "try the exploit on me, I'm not updating!"

Hey!

Huge enough. You don't have to be inworld to show your IP. Loading an image off a server someone controls gives it away too. If I post an image in this very thread and watch the logs, I'll get 10-20 hits within the next 20 minutes.

And one of them will be you. Considering that portscanning for your UDP listening port will take seconds...

I say bring it on bitches! It's farging war! They can't drain an account that has no money in it it. And as far as my stuff goes. Meh. I can get more stuff.

Actually, I'm just not going to log in until the Non WL Cool Viewer is patched.

Mmm... it's not about stuff, really.

The bug patched in 1.20.17 allowed anyone to upload a file to your computer and place it anywhere on your drive.

Including, in most cases, Windows system directories, which would mean instant total control of your machine. Do you do anything interesting with it, or is it just a typewriter?

It's basically a newsreader more than anything else.

It'll be a nice relay machine for sending email spam or work as part of a botnet then - unless it already is.

So far it seems pretty clean. I run spybot and ad aware regularly. Besides the fact that the connection isn't on when I'm not using it. I really don't worry too much about all that stuff.