Second account ?

Someone I was talking to the other day mentioned that she wanted to have a second account, ..ie, have 2 avatars with seperate names . I am aware that once chosen, you cannot change the name of your av, but is it possible to HAVE 2 accounts in that way and if so...how ?.............Thanks.

Just follow the usual registration process.. somewhere in there you will be asked if you are creating an alternate account. It's been a while so I don't know the specifics, but it is pretty much as simple as that.

There's a 'Create Account' button on the world log-in screen which is how I made mine.

Yes, just fill our a registration for a new account and check the box saying that you already have a Second Life account. You will be required to provide payment info (credit card or PayPal), and will be billed $9.95 USD as a one-time fee if it will be a Basic account. You could also sign up the alt as a Premium account, at a higher fee, if you want that new account to be able to own mainland land.

Purchasing an alt account and starting over from scratch is the only way at this time to change your SL name, and as with any new account, you are limited to the names available at the time of account creation.

Alt accounts are nice if you like playing more than one role in SL. Perhaps you have one that looks like your real self, one that looks like sone sort of furry character, one of the opposite gender. Alts each have a unique name, obtained at registration. If you set your SL client up for multiple logins, you can even have more than one account logged in at a time, so you can play both roles at once! (Do a forum search for "multiple login" for details).

To me, the biggest advantage of an alt account is that it's "an entirely different person" as far as anyone else is concerned, so if you want to be male in one, and female in another, you can have a suitable name for each role. Your guy role doesn't have to be named Mary, if your existing account is Mary. For example, Ceera has an alt that is her twin brother, for when I feel like playing a male for a change, or to roleplay interacting with others as a brother and sister who do things together for fun.

Alt accounts do not share anything with your main account other than your identity, and only Linden Lab knows which accounts are alts or who they belong to. An alt is the same as any other account, other than the paperwork at registration that links both accounts to you.

You can pay L$ to your alt account, or transfer any transferrable or copyable items to them, just as you can to anyone else. They can't share your friends list or non-transfer items.

Note that the above is the LEGAL procedure for obtaining an alt. You may also hear people complaining about "unverified alts" - most often used by griefers. Those are accounts stolen from Linden Lab by existing SL users who lie on their registration form and deny that they already have an SL account, thus enabling them to get multiple accounts that have no payment info on file and for which they paid nothing. LL's complete lack of ID verification makes this possible, but it's a bad thing to do, and if they catch you at it, LL can ban the extra accounts and all their assets can be forfeited.

Also make sure, that you do not register from a network with many connections. There are, as far as I understand it, a limit per network. This is for example the reason, that people have a hard time registering alt accounts from universities and dorm rooms, although once registered, they can use it on every computer.