Newb with a question-Hopefully not too dumb

Hi my name is Brownie and I'm not exactly new but I'm now really starting to get into SL. In fact I like it so much I was wondering if I could make it portable...well kinda anyway. Can I down load the SL viewer to a pc and then on to a flash drive or better yet can I down load it directly to the flash drive. I'm jonesing to get on and I'm not at on my own pc but my trusty flash drive is by my side. Sorry if this question is dumb.


Thnx

just try it and see if the flash has enough memory to take the program. i haven't heard of anyone running it off a flash or disk or anything, but i don't see why not. report back to let us know how it goes.

Hello Brownie. I had a quick glance with Google, and I think this is what you are looking for. Try it and see if it works for you:

http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/gaming/SLOnAFlashDrive

Good luck

Maybe I'll try this tomorrow just to see if it can be done. If I can only remember where my flash drive is.

It works! I installedSL into a 256mb usb drive and then stuck it into another computer and ran the secondlife program from the usb. I even made the batch file from that site that Howard listed and it deletes the second life folder in application data automatically. If you don't use the batch file you could manually go in and clean it up yourself assuming you have the rights. Since that folder is where SL stores the cached textures you don't see continuous reading and writing to the usb drive while playing. Using this method you will constantly get popups as if you were a new user but it's a small annoyance.

did it run slower/faster than an installed version? what was your experience?

My framerate was faster but I think it was mainly that the computer I tested it on is much better than mine. In terms of textures downloading it took the same amount of time. SL is such a 'back heavy' program where you have a small 70mb client and then you download gigabytes of data while you play. Compare that to a 'front heavy' online game where the client is 4gb and you transfer a smaller amount of data. I'd say running from a usb or disk doesn't really help that much in terms of performance. It certainly helps in portability though.

Thanks for the link and and the info. I will definately try this tonight. I am well past jonesing for a SL fix.

Guys I can't seem to do this right can someone walk me through it step by step. I'm sorry I seem to be so pc illiterate. I would really appreciate the help. Thank you.

Why do you want to put the viewer on a flash drive?

Go here:

http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php

Click on download button and choose save file. Save it to your computer's hard drive not the flash drive. I just save it to the desktop.

Run the downloaded program 'Second_Life_1-19-0-5_Setup.exe'

When it asks you where to install it type out a new path like:

f:\secondlife

where 'f' is the drive letter of your flash drive.

And that should be it. You should be able to bring that flash drive to another computer. On the other computer you need to go to My Computer and double click the flash drive (assuming the flash drive shows up correctly on the new computer) and open the second life folder. Then just double click on the file that says 'SecondLife.exe' or just 'SecondLife'. It WILL make a folder in your c: drive though for the cached files.

C:\Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\SecondLife

You might want to delete this aftewards as it contains some data that has your avatar name on it. Wow. I'm looking at mine right now and SL creates folders for my mispelled logins too! Haha.

As an addendum to this, you could also go into your SL preferences in the network tab and try changing the path for cached files. I haven't tried it. I don't know if this will stop making files on your c: drive.

I want to have it on a flash drive so that when I'm not at home I can play SL on any pc I might be able to use without downloading it on to someone's pc and they don't want it on there. Some people don't like it when you download programs they don't want on their pc's

I read that Second Life keeps all its files in the one program folder when installed on a pc.

So I took the batch script suggested by The Travelin' Librarian (http://www.travelinlibrarian.info/2007/01/second-life-portable.html), modified it to run silently by removing the pauses and then compiled it as a ghost exe.

I then created a folder on my usb stick into which I put this ghost exe and a copy of the Second Life program folder installed on my pc.

This seems to work tolerably well on my usb stick with the ghost exe running as an executable front end which in turn launches Second Life.

You need to change where Second Life saves its cache and message log, but you can do that manually in Edit>Preferences.

Btw I've found the best way of using stuff on my usb stick is the portableapps.com platform.

I'd appreciate comments!

I would recommend that you start an entirely new thread rather than trying to bring back to life something that has been dead for almost 6 months.

I think he had something valuable to contribute to the thread, and I can see advantages to having it all in one thread instead of scattered around it several different ones.

Sadly the thread is poorly named.

Addicted