To improve my Windlight experience...

Can someone please direct me to items to turn up or down or on and off? I'm not that familiar with each of the tools do (or even where they are), so if you could make this "for Dummies", I'd appreciate it. For instance, I keep seeing people refer to their fps, but I'm not even sure where'd I'd find that information.

I'll refer back to this thread tonight when I get home.

To get your frames-per-second (and other geeky information) you can press Ctrl - Shift - D, it brings up loads of data but at the top you'll get your FPS. Just hit the keys again to get rid of that data.

As for tuning Windlight; it depends what you want and what you're willing to sacrifice. Before Windlight I got 10fps or so, and on the Windlight client set to "High" in graphics I get the same. However what I did was the following:
- Select "Mid" in graphics for the detail
- Select the "Custom" check-box
- De-select the "Atmospheric Shaders" box
- Reduce "Avatar Detail" and "Object detail" to half
- Set "Flexible Prim Detail" detail and "Tree Detail" to whatever you feel is appropriate for you. I set trees to low because I rarely see many at once, and flexi-prims I kept fairly high as they go wacky quite quickly otherwise =)
- Reduce draw distance to 128m or less (more than that doesn't really show much, less than that IMO isn't overly disruptive but it's up to you).

This will leave you with much the same skies you had before Windlight, but still with the pretty new water and a whole lot more frames-per-second, and thus a smoother, more playable experience. You can of course switch the Atmospheric Shaders back-on whenever you want to watch a nice sunset, or take a cool snapshot or such.
I get around 25 - 30 fps with these settings.

If you want to keep the pretty skies then I'd likely still recommend reducing draw-distance, object and avatar detail. You won't get as huge a performance gain but it should help.

One thing to note is that reducing the avatar detail slider will reduce the distance at which avatars turn into "Impostors". These are low-detail "snapshots" of avatars which greatly reduce the cost of rendering a full-blown, prim-covered avatar, but they look a bit pixelated and slow.
I personally don't notice them much and find it helps my FPS, but if your graphics card doesn't have much memory then you may wish to turn off "Avatar Impostors" in the graphics tab as they can reduce performance in that case.

Hope some of this helps!

Below are the pictures I am taking with my SL. Is this normal to have the edges of my island to have such a pronounced separation between SL water and my estate water?

Thanks, I'll try these things when I get home. Hopefully I can grow to appreciate WL before I have it shoved down my throat.