Well, not the totally impatient, but still... DAZ's installer looks for where you have Poser installed when you run it. This, for smoe reason, can take a long time. I get the impression that it looks in numerous places for it before guessing at the location. Here's what I've found: If you wait for it to find it (at least on my machine) you'll fall asleep before it succeeds. If you cancel it, you'll have to browse to your Poser 4 install directory. HOWEVER If you count slowly to 15 and THEN cancel it, it will have the right directory pre-filled. I'm not sure what it's doing after that point shrug. Anyway, thought I'd share this tip.

It searches all the drives and volumes on the system for Poser installation. If you have more than one, it gives you a choice of which one to install to. I have two 80 gig drives, and 4 Poser installations, so I always stop it and locate myself. If you wait like you mentioned, it will have already found one installation and is still checking the rest of the drives.

I don't even wait that long. As soon as the stupid button comes up, I hit cancel and the installer goes happily along its way. I thought I was the only one who was having issues with it. ;-)

I wait long, but I do what dodger says and it works fine. Sharen

I handle it differently... I don't install anything till I'm ready to work on something. By then, I have 10-15 products from DAZ waiting. The first install takes a while, as "tha dodger" says. But after than, because it's cached or what, each install finds the Poser folder almost instantaneously. So, I only have one long wait out of 10-15 products installed (LOL).

... Do I even want to ask why one would need 4 poser installations?... :-)

Damn those 80 gig hard drives and custom Poser installs. :) I usually do a quick quit too. But your right. Don't quit right away. Wait a few seconds.

If DAZ is taking suggestions, I have one... You know how when you install a driver in Windows it gives the options of 'Search for the location of the driver' and 'Specify the location of a driver' and the search box has a dropdown menu of places to search? Something like that, where you have a dialogue at the beginning that says: Where should I install the DAZ Product you have purchased?

• Specify:
• Standard: C:Program FilesMetacreationsPoser 4 C:Program FilesCuriousLabsPoser 4 C:Program FilesCuriousLabsPoser 5
• Search

Yes - I would love to be able to point the installer to the correct directory, as I don't use the usual one. Also, on XP, I find that installing a few products in a row does not speed up the lengthy process each time. thanks - dg

The speedup happens for me with XP, and Poser on D: in splendid (near) isolation.

You don't need a speedup if you never wait. Heh I never install directly into Poser anyway, so cancelling, then pointing to my 'Poser Install' directory is quick and easy. Even for updaters that must be installed directly into Poser I cancel and show it where Poser is. I still HATE exe's though. I can't peek into the dern things.

I didn't know about the cancelling thing until this thread, so I'll try that next time. :-) -dg

I've thought about 4 or more Poser installs-- one for Fantasy, one for urban grit, one for fashion, One for sci-fi. I wait about 15 20 seconds and click cancel-- it usually has found both of my installs by then-- but not the cannibalised one on the auxilliary drive. I also like to install a lot at once, and I'm on XP, so for the next one I can cancel right away and it has the one I want to install to right in the window waiting. Emily

I'm on ME (yeah, I know -- I'd get XP but I still haven't seen anything on how to make it look like Windows and not a friggin kid's toy, I hate that GUI style -- besides, I can't afford stuff lke new OSes) I don't get the speedup after the first install, either.

Making XP look like Windows is dead easy. Right click on the background, select Properties, select the Appearance tab, then select Windows Classic Style from the drop down. That's how I have mine set. Rainy Day colour scheme, if you're interested. :)

Same for me, SamTherapy...hehe.

When I set my XP to classic style, I also found there was a performance boost. XP is noticably faster and more responsive; not a huge lot, but noticably more so.

I prefer the new look in XP :: but even when I run WindowBlinds it's still snappy. It really depends on your video card.

Well, I shall consider it then when I am not a dead broke person B^) (rather find a copy of Windows 2K though -- fro what I have heard it's more stable)

I like actually like the look of XP, but I changed the theme from that nasty blue to silver. I didnt like it at first but it grew on me. Also I disabled most of the visual effects for more speed but it still looks like XP...

I thought XP was the same as win2k, just bloated and fancied up?

Well 'more' stable doesn't mean much actually. It's kinda like saying someone is more pregnant than someone else. Stability just isn't an issue with XP.

Spit: Do you mean both are unstable, as the prefix 'Windows ' on the OS name implies, or that both are stable? See, to me, 'stable' means Slackware Linux with the kernel custom compiled for the machine it's running on, with the concept of rebooting limited to hardware changes and kernel upgrades. I've heard the difference between the primary OSes describes as thus: UNIX/Linux you reboot once every six months when you buy mor RAM, Macintosh you reboot once a week when the OS forgets it's supposed to exist, Windows you reboot three times a day because you have no choice.

... so to me, 'twice as stable' on Windows would be 'You only have to reboot three times every two days' whereas on Linux, as you said, 'more stable' is meaningless, or indicates that I found some way to do hot-swappable RAM.

As a small note: while Linux is generally 'stable' in the non-relative sense of the term, even the hardiest OSes ever designed can crash when you set your apache MaxClients too high while running mod_perl Apache with MySQL... as I have recently discovered. There exists a point at which even the most perfect OS available can find itself screaming under too high a load and end up locking up from using all its CPU to swap because the real memory ran out three days ago B^)

I cancel immediately and tell it where to point too. I REALLY wish DAZ would offer a zip option though. Especially with offerings that have multiple "articles." With zip files I often choose to just install just one piece of the package. A prop for example rather than 2 vicki textrues and all the associated pz2s, vicki clothing objects, cr2s, and textures, hair..., etc. It keeps the librarie size down and makes uninstalling when you're done easier. Please DAZ. How 'bout a zip option?

Pablo: Why not just get the Mac SIT archives? Stuffit Expander is available for PC and free.

dodger, That's a great idea but the last time I loaded Stuffit (about a year ago), it kept overriding my zip file associations everytime I used it. Does it still do that?

Well, um, you never tried the Amiga then. I had a runaway program that was eating all the ram. When the ram filled up my Amiga popped up a message telling me ram was full. So I killed the process and cleared stuff out of my ram disk and went merrily on my way. Back to XP. I rebooted yesterday because the latest MS security update required it. Other than that I haven't had to reboot since I don't even remember.

Pablo: You can tell it not to on install or afterwards in preferences. Spit: yup, I can make X-windows do that too, but I can't see what's going on on the console of my Linux PC. It's in a co-location facility in Portland and hasn't got a monitor -- it's a server B^) -- the only way I can run X on it is remotely from here using WinaXe and, well, that means that I daren't have it up all the time. No reboot since unknown? Well, that is impressive...

Gee, we Mac users are lucky. I never just let anything install itself, but will Extract it first into its own folder. sit files are often smaller, too.

I generally don't bother aborting the initial drive search, but then I'm reasonably patient and my system doesn't take much time for the search. I tend to buy multiple things when I'm on a DAZ shopping spree, and all the installs after the first one bring up all the poser installations the initial search found. This is on XP by the way. I make my own zip files from DAZ stuff by installing to a "fake" poser directory. It's simply a folder with a copy of Poser.exe in it, anything the installer adds can be simply highlighted and compressed to create an explorable archive of the product.

For those who asked why I use 4 different installations, it is simple. I'm a developper. I need to have each Poser version isolated to test my products accordingly. So I have 4 installs. Poser Pro Pack for developping. This has a mess in Runtime from all the folders created during production. This is where I also install stuff I buy or get from free areas to test prior to droping it on my clea Runtimes. Poser 4.03 For compatability testing. Poser Pro Pack for my actual Poser enjoyment. Poser 5 for compatability testing. This keeps my work organized and easy to manage since I know where the messes are.

Emily - Do you actually have 4 installs or just thinking about it. I've been thinking about the same thing. My directories have gotten ridiculous - maybe one for post V3 and one for pre-V3 -

When I buy from DAZ I end up with multiple items. First one is slow, but all the rest are much faster. Didn't know about the cancel trick, I'll try that next time.

I thought it was a fluke My best Renderosity moment was when JeffH let me know that you can have as many installs of poser4 as you wish. I have 2 poser 4s and 1 poser 5. I've bought a lot of "poser accessories" and I want to have them all! Oh my it really is a sickness... Then theres Vue. ;-)

I'm a "clean freak"! In each of my sole installation of Poser 5, Vue and Brcye 4,I have only the products installed I'm planning to use....when I'm done with them, I move them to a CD Rom. I also store new products I've purchased on CD's until I plan to use them. I have lots of CD Roms and very well organized PC :)

Since I generally install more than one product at a time, I also find that after the first DAZ install, it goes a lot faster (running XP Pro.....a totally stable OS that you can run for a month without rebooting! And more useable than my Linux Mandrake, with its limited software options)

I always cancel and extract to a temporary folder,then I move the files manually except the exe is an update and looks for previous installed items (like the V3 upgrade that looks for V2).