A few weeks ago, I had a Pentium 3 with 128MB of RAM. I recently upgraded to an Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB, and things are running much snappier now.

Poser 4 was a big memory hog, and Poser 5 is no improvement in this area. Both versions suffer from memory leaks, so the more memory you have, the longer it can run before becoming unstable. Also, the trend in 3D is toward higher-resolution meshes and textures, which consume memory in a hurry.

Buy as much memory as you can afford, then take out a loan and buy more, up to the maximum supported by your motherboard. Win2000 and WinXP have better memory management than earlier versions of Windows, so consider upgrading your OS if necessary.