Muliple Accounts Single PC - Win XP

This is kind of the opposite question of one asked earlier.

I am on Windows XP, 2.0 Ghz P4, 1 Gig Main Mem, ATI 9550 256 Meg Video Card.
I have GIGS of 7200 RPM disk available.

The lag and load issues are affecting me as well. And I'm no Win XP guru.

With mulitple accounts playing SL..(basically my alt for testing purposes)..my question is this.

I would like to set Win XP up so that each account uses is own SL and especially cache file. I have tried setting up different users and signing in as that in Win XP but that seems to be using the same instance and cache of the program.

Could anyone out there advise me how to set this up so that I can use more than one copy of SL, or is there an INI file I can affect.

If im gonna take 2 hours to rezz a new sim..I would like to use different 1 gig caches at least so I can store MORE texture etc info than sharing the same cache between accounts.

Thank you in advance.

I wish SL had a ini file to change temp/cache ,, but it doesnt,

But if you log several diffrent alts they will have their own cache in the same folder, but settings will be identical ~.~ , you can change some it wont affect the other, but some like land ? i think affect both same time.

1 alt with 1 gig cache = 1 gig
3 alt with 1 gig cache = 3 gig

ect... eh if you accidentally try to log in with a wrong name it will still create a 1 gig cache ~.o i kinda made a mess logging in with mine a few times, noticed i had 12.7gig cache : p

Are you installing SL into 3 different directories and then giving each account a seperate shortcut?

Watch out, apparently according to people like Kenny Linden, second life forbids alt accounts. Apparently it's against their TOS. lol.

Hmm... I think you read it wrong, I haven't seen what he said, but I've very sure he didn't mean it like that.

Thats not true. While they may not "allow" more than one free account, you are permitted to own as many as you'd like. If you browse thro the SL website, youll see this info, they charge 9.99 for aditional account. They wouldnt be doing this if it were "forbidden."

Carson,

Hiya! Here is a list of commands you can pass to secondlife.exe:
http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=newview


I am not sure because I haven't fiddled with it much, but this MIGHT be where you can start:
-settings <filename>specify configuration filename; default is "settings.ini"

Let us all know if that helps!

~Mad

You may be able to may a different ini file for your alt. You could specify like this:


SecondLife.exe -multiple -login Carson Hadlee yourpassword -settings altsettings.ini -logfile altlog.log -purge

What this should do is:

-multiple allows you to log in to multiple instances of SL
-login automatically logs you in with the specified user name
-log changes the log file name
-purge delete files in cache

Now I am not certain, because like I said I have not fiddled with it much, but it looks as though specifying these options will make them true for that instance of SL. So perhaps specifying them for each one would give you what you are looking for.

For anyone needing further instructions:

1. Right click on your SL Icon on your desktop.
   
2. Click on properties.
   
3. The Target will look something like this:
   "C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe"
   
4. Change it to:
   "C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -multiple -login Firstname Lastname YourPassword -settings altsettings.ini -logfile altlog.log -purge
   
5. Do this for each account you want to run separatley.
   

Hop this helps,
Mad

I really appreciate all the tips and tricks! Thanks for all that homework.

I did check my c:/Application Data/SecondLife/ files area. The two characters are indeed listed..but the only thing I see under them is their last screen shot. There is only ONE cache file and it contains the BIG data.db.x.15317 cache of 1,024,000 KB.

I was asking if I could have TWO of these...so each different character could have its own cache.

But I guess there is no way to have multiple CACHE files. In looking through the settings.ini file there is no path listed to the cache..so it must be default behavior within the program itself.

I should start a feature request for this...seems to me its reasonable to allow it. These two characters go different places..see different things..and therefore do not share all that much between them cache wise. And lord knows I have GIGS of disk space sitting around!

If anybody knows any better...please holler here...

Thanks a million again to all who responded.

I don't think this is true.
In the "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\SecondLife" folder on my system there is one folder called cache, and and one folder for each account, and one folder for Logs, and one folder for User Settings.

The only thing stored in the individual account folders is the screen_last.bmp file, the limage on the screen the last time the account logged out.

(unless you have a more specific reason for wanting seperate caches) why bother?
doesn't the data in the cache get swapped in and out as you move to diferent locations. a defrag and check on that part of the disk would help. i may be wrong on this. does anyone know for sure.

I do have a specific reason....

actually two...

One is the lag I incur in Second Life...why bother swapping out textures from one character when the other character logs in...this is just one more laggy thing to not bother with.

But I guess the second reason makes even more sense...these days nearly the cheapest part of the computer is storage on hard drives.... with all the talk about more CPU cycles, more Memory on faster cards...and all that....why not allow multiple caches for different characters??...its the cheapest thing that could be done that might a big difference for a lot of people.

My 2 cents