Initial Hardware Issues

Thus far, the experience I have had with Second Life has been slightly frustrating. It does seem interesting, and I do think it is a new medium that should be investigated for internet marketing purposes. It also seems to fit in with my current interests in Web 2.0, interactivity, collaboration, emerging technologies, etc.

My PC is an HP with a 2.41 GHz AMD Athlon 64 bit processor, running Windows XP Pro. I initially had 512 GB of RAM. In other words, my machine isn't the greatest, but it could certainly be a lot worse. I think as far as the average user, I may even have a slightly better machine. However, despite this, I had trouble getting Second Life to run well on my machine. I could log in, but everything was very slow and blurry. Something like a brown tree trunk had a rainbow type pixel look to it. I pretty much assumed this was a graphic card issue.

I am admittedly not a gamer, and I don't really do anything all that graphic intensive on my machine, so the graphics card issue never came up until now. A little investigating led me to find out that I have an on-board SiS 760 graphic card. A web search revealed that this card had no memory of its own but "borrowed" memory from my RAM. This I assumed didn't help matters any.

I knew I would have to upgrade my card. I went to the SL site to see what was compatible. Well, I was fairly surprised to see the long list of cards that weren't supported!

Screen shot from system requirements page at: www.secondlife.com



There is also a fair difference between the system "Requirements" (the absolute bare minimum needed to run Second Life) and the "Recommendations", as the following screen shots show:





In an attempt to make things smoother for my Second Life experience, I added an additional 1 GB of RAM. (Which I happened to find at a very reasonable price on Newegg.com if anyone is in the memory market) This helped as far as speeding things up, by visually I was still having issues.

Thankfully, someone had an extra graphics card lying around that they were kind of enough to give me, and this has made a considerable difference. The card is an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 with 128 MB of RAM. This is an average card (and certainly better than my existing card) but things are still not perfect in SL. While it has made a considerable difference as far as blurriness (I wasn't even able to read the basic instructions before or make my way around the map because things were so blurry) I still have odd colorations in my avatar and other avatars look like black shadows until I get close enough to them.

Graphic issues seen in avatar:



With all the issues I had getting SL up and running, I wonder how user friendly it is to someone who is truly a "newbie" with no gaming background. Aside from issues such as graphics cards and memory, Second Life currently does not support Windows Vista. This means anyone getting a new computer will not be able to play. (Although, I am sure a Vista friendly update is in the works)

If Second Life is to be used as a "virtual classroom" in an academic sense, I have to ask how a distance education student who is only comfortable with the "basics" of computing (internet, word processing, emailing) will fare transitioning into a virtual world? Maybe it will give some students the spark they need to advance their computing skills and dive right in to emerging technologies in communication such as this. A SL representation is certainly an exciting concept for colleges and businesses willing to investigate it, but I think it will still take time for it to be adopted as a standard in the online experience.

This is basically my first impression based on the limited experience I have had with SL. Maybe in the course of my research, I will gain new insight that will prove some of my initial opinions wrong. But isn't that the fun of exploring a new concept in technology?

Ok, off to learn how to move around without bumping into things in SL... :)