How to make Second Life run better on your computer

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Second Life is very computer intensive, so you may find it struggles a bit. So here are a few things that have worked for me.

If you use a laptop, make sure it is plugged in, and any power management software you are running is letting your laptop run at maximum performance.

SL uses a lot of your CPU, so if you have other programs running it may be worthwhile closing some, for example messenger, outlook etc etc. NB: Do not indiscriminately close programs if you do not know what they are as this may cause your computer to crash! And, under no circumstances, turn off your firewall or virus protector.

Firefox pre-caches a lot of data, so if you have it open it may make SL run slower over the course of a few hours.

While in Second Life, you can go to the Preferences option at the top of the screen (Edit>Preferences) and reset some of those to use lower resolution
- on the Graphics tab set the Draw distance to a low number
- on the Graphics details tab set Terrain Detail to Low and reduce all the Mesh Detail settings
- on the Adv. Graphics tab set your Graphics Card Memory to suit your machine (if in doubt use a lower setting) and reduce the Outfit Composite Limit
- on the Audio & Video tab mute audio, turn off streaming music and video

People using Apple computers have noticed an improvement in performance if they delete the Second Life cache every so often (find the Second Life folder on your computer and delete the Cache folder in there - not any other Cache).