Yesterday in my SL News I mentioned the rumor that the Firestorm Dev Team would release version 5.0.1. The viewer hasn’t updated since August 2016, four plus months. It did release late Tuesday. Once word spread the Firestorm site overloaded, I think, and has been down on and off ever since.

Firestorm Overload – Dec 2016 – Firefox

You can expect that behavior to continue today. 

It is an assumption on my part the site is overloaded. There could be other causes. But, Inara is reporting it is server overload. That makes the most sense.

Firestorm Overload – Dec 2016 Chrome

If you start looking for other places to get a copy, you’ll find them. But, all of those sites I can find have version 4.7.9. And there is little means of finding out if they are giving you the pristine copy or a copy modified to steal your password. You take your chances.

So, until the line shrinks to something tolerable, read Inara’s article: Firestorm 5-0: Bento, VOB, VLC and more!

What Else?

This version doesn’t require a clean install. They recommend “uninstalling” your current version and then installing 5.0.1. That leaves me wondering what all the uninstall process removes. Obviously, we want to leave the caches. But, does the uninstall take out the settings?

I use the 64-bit version of Firestorm. The program installs in:

C:\Program Files\Firestorm-Releasex64

None of the files in that folder have changed in the last month. Test that by opening Windows’ File Explorer, navigate to the folder, type an ‘*’ in the search field (no quotes), then select ‘Date Modified’. You can pick any date range.

So, the day-to-day changes are in:

C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Local\FirestormOS_x64

or

C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Roaming\Firestorm_x64

The caches are in LOCAL and user stuff in ROAMING. So, when we uninstall we want to leave the data in LOCAL to be left in place. Makes sense to me it would be. But, I’m not so sure about the stuff in ROAMING. There are chat logs, settings and avatar specific stuff in ROAMING. Some should logically be left and depending on viewer changes some should probably be removed. I can imagine why settings would be a file that needs to be replaced.

The 64-bit version of Firestorm does not have an uninstall program like the Linden viewer does (ininst.exe). So, we use the Windows Control Panel’s Settings, Apps & features. Just type Programs in Windows’ search (Ask me anything).

Clicking ‘UNINSTALL’ gets us a bit of a scary message.

Windows Firestorm Uninstall Scare

But, we get a second screen with the Repair of Uninstall options.

Second FS Uninstall Screen

Click Uninstall and bam… you are uninstalling. No more options. But, this uninstall process leaves LOCAL and ROAMING untouched, as best I can tell. It did leave my settings.xml file in place. Which is good as in writing this I forgot to save a new backup copy of my settings file.

FS Settings Files

Now, I’m ready for a new install of Firestorm. Then I can check to see which files may be overwritten. All I have to do is wait…

More pages, see links below.