Ok, maybe it's because I'm an idiot, but...

Noh, before you give up hope yet, you *might* be able to get better performance if you lower some of the graphics settings in SL to the bare minimum to get the most out of what bandwidth you do have.

Go to Edit -> Preferences and do things like:

1. turn off Shiny, Ripple Water, and Shadows if they're on.
   
2. Lower your draw distance to 64. (Draw is how far away you can see. If you lower that down, you're not streaming as much information.)
   
3. Turn on the Avatar Vertex thingamajiggie.
   
4. Essentially, anything that says (slower), turn off. Anything that indicates you'll run faster, turn it on. Try to lower everything down to the bare minimum and see if that helps. If it does, you can carefully start upping things until you find a balance of performance and graphical quality you can live with.
   

If you need help with any of this, feel free to IM me inworld.

Good luck!

Hmmpf, no wonder you have massive lag. If it's possible and if you can afford it, upgrade to at the very least 512kbps link.

if you are using a mac or a luix or whatever it is called, switch to windows. it just may be the whole computer you are using, as from what i have expierenced, SL orks best on windows!

Tre, I did kinda mention my system has Windows XP on it, in post #10...

Anyway, playing around with the options, I have gotten a reasonable degree of control the way I want it, though I'd be hard-pressed to do anything that requires fine movements or quick responses.

Graphics are kinda gimpy now at the lowest settings, but I'll save the tweaking upwards of settings for another day.

Decent pathfinding on the right click > go here feature would be nice first...

And on topic...

How long does it take between pressing/releasing controls and getting a reaction?

I've tried running SL in various places and haven't yet found anywhere that the response is as good as I expected it to be when I started. I think one of the main things is likely to be that client side prediction for movement isn't very good. Terrible, if you compare it to first person shooters and the like. Luckily the majority of things I do in SL don't require precise movement so it doesn't really bother me. I find the best way to deal with it is to always be thinking about the movement you want to do before you do it - and it makes pulling off cool maneuvers more satisfying.

If you meant me, personally, with settings set to "Do you have to sweep away the cobwebs because that machine is so freaking old?!", it's still about a second or so, assuming I'm in an area that's already been cached (with cache currently set to 1GB, BTW... with 90-something GB free, space is not an issue ).

I guess it's going to depend on where you are in the world (RL), but it's possible it won't get much better. I initially gave up on SL because it was so bad and didn't fit with any of the ideas for stuff to do I'd come up with, but came back out of curiosity and realised that there's loads of stuff that precise movement isn't needed for.

The two things I found most useful dealing with it are moving the camera with alt and flying while looking around by dragging on my avatar with the cursor.

Actually it just takes a bit of practice with all of the keys. I find that males have more trouble walking than females. I am guessing that is because they are mashing down their arrow keys like they are in some combat situation.

You can apply all of the technical solutions you want but you still won't walk properly without the proper amount of practice.

Moved to Technical Issues for future focus.

Also something gentle to consider... I haven't seen this explicitly mentioned here, but Noh, have you checked the numbers in the Statistics Bar?

Press CTRL-SHIFT-1 and call that up. Maybe even take a screenshot and post it here.

Basically look at Ping Sim and Ping User for now. They should be as low as possible. Something like "100 ms" will be pretty smooth motion, but "500 ms" is a delay that'll make you see yourself walking into the ground and you will feel a definite loss of control. The numbers will jump around.

After you've been inworld for awhile, go to HELP menu ---> ABOUT SECOND LIFE and look what it says next to Packets Lost. That's a cumulative reading for one session of having been logged in to SL, up to the present point in time. A higher number of packets (e.g. 78622/79500) will give you a better average, but simply put, the percentage should be as close to 0% as possible.

Best of hope. ^^

Sorry about the forum misplacement. I did look for more a appropriate forum, but somehow missed the Tech one. I'm guessing from the lack of bannedness the offense isn't viewed as a significant one for a newbie.

No, I wasn't aware of that option, Torley, nor had I checked it (obviously ). I was wondering where that functionality was, though, having seen it in the other MMO thingy in which I participate (if sporadically), Jumpgate, which gives the option for basic connectivity stats to be displayed along the top of the screen.

I did try reading the documentation, but apparently didn't try hard enough.

After reviewing my finances, and checking the costs, I decided to go for one of the faster DSL options, namely the 3mbit/386kbit down/up one. Service should (key word, as always with a "Baby Bell" be activated as of Wednesday, a which point I'll really get to see if I can bust out the graphics details.