Help on creating an alt

Could someone please walk me through the steps for setting up an alt. avatar? I have a basic account but would like to create an alt. Thank you.
Artemis Felwitch

Log out of your main account on secondlife.com and then choose "Create a new basic account" from the main page. There is no charge for creating an alt account.

The last names they have now are BORING! Might want to wait a bit.
WHich makes me think they might have the pick your own for a fee, with such boring names who wouldn't?

What's the utility of an alt? I heard that many people do alts but why?

For pure utility (apart from fun reasons), having an alt is great for troubleshooting. For example, I make animations (mostly for fun, maybe one day for sale). To test couples animations, I need two avatars. My friends are not necessarily available to help whenever I'm ready to test things, and standing around on poseballs while I study and adjust things may not be the most fun thing in the world to them anyway. So I have an alt account that I can log in, at the same time as my main account, and do some animation testing.

It also has come in handy when setting up vendors in my little art store. It isn't clear that the permissions on the items I'm selling are being set correctly if I'm just selling to myself. I needed an alt to try it and confirm that the permissions were being set correctly.

The pricing info talks about a one-time $9.95 fee to set up an alt.

Clearly you can just set up another basic account, but there must be some advantage or reason to have both personas under one account. Not sure what that is, though. Also not clear how you set up an Alt as opposed to just another account.

As it stands now, an Alt IS just another account. It isn't connected to your main, and you aren't charged the fee.

It's been confirmed via Support that they stopped charging about a year ago. They haven't updated the info publicly for some unknown LL reason.

Personally, I use an alt in my land group to ensure 2 members at all time...if membership drops below that, it's possible to lose your land.

That is explained a little better in the knowledge base now, look for the alt account FAQ. the current explanation is "Your first Basic account is free, and we won't charge you for a few alternate accounts. If we find that you've been creating an army of alts, we may charge a small fee of US$9.95 for the creation of each additional Basic account as a way to recoup some of the cost of maintaining the accounts for you."

Thanks everyone for the fast response and explanations. Greatly appreciated.

Just a little explanation here:

Linden Lab considers the very first account that you create to be the "main" account, even if they don't say that. You can create 4 additional accounts leading to the SAME e-mail address. Those additional accounts are called (here) "alts." For example:

Oryx Tempel is my main account. I use her 99.5% of the time that I login to SL. I also have an alt, called Emer Fitzgerald, who exists ONLY to co-own a group. She has zero social life, etc. (Poor thing.)

There is a huge difference between an "alt" and an "avatar." An alt is an entirely new account according to Linden Lab. You will need to enter in your name, birthdate, address, etc to create a new alt.

An avatar is the stuff that you put on your account's digital character to make it appear a certain way. You can have a human avatar, a dragon avatar, a dog avatar, a vampire avatar, etc etc etc. Oryx Tempel can be a lovely lady on one day, and a raven the next day, depending on which avatar I chose to employ. So can Emer Fitzgerald.

It sounds a whole lot more confusing than it really is. I'd advise NOT creating an alt(ernate) account until you're sure you want or need one. Maybe you just need to be a box/dragon/dog avatar for a while? Doesn't mean you need to create a whole new account.

Best of luck to you.