Second go at Second Life

Well, I had another go at getting Second Life working smoothly on my laptop over the weekend - updated my XP graphics card drivers, killed as many running processes as I could, and found it didn't make the slightest bit of difference - I still had a frame rate of, at the most, 2 frames per second !!
In the end, I gave up on XP, booted into Vista Ultimate, installed Second Life (with no issues), and started it up. And guess what ? It ran smoothly, and that's despite Vista not being officially supported by Second Life yet ! It seems that the Vista driver for my graphics card can handle Second Life better than the most up to date XP driver downloaded from Dell. All the more reason for me to use Vista as my primary OS (now if only Netgear could get its act together and get the Vista driver out for my SAN device, I could ditch XP altogether....).

So what of Second Life ? Well, I had a look at the various SL Universities, including the University of Hertfordshire which has some land and a building, but not a lot else by the look of it... I also joined the University of Derby's SL group (along with Mat and Mel), but couldn't find any of them online when I was there. I'm sure we'll meet up at some point though !
I was generally impressed with the whole idea though, and am looking forward to buying my first avatar (yes, yes, I know it's money for air really, but I just really want that avatar !!).