Attached Link: Memory Managers

I've read many posts where people advise the use of memory managers to help with Poser. I have never trusted these programs. Here is an excerpt from a good article that confirms my own thought that such a program is not needed for the newer operating systems such as Windows XP (I provided a link for your convenience): "Third-party memory managers This weakness in older operating systems spawned a slew of programs designed to improve memory management. These programs all worked the same way. First they'd purge all segments of memory that were marked purgeable. (Normally memory isn't purged unless it's wanted.) Then they'd defragment the memory by moving all the used areas together. This would free up larger blocks of memory, but it wouldn't offer any additional RAM. Are these programs necessary? On any modern system they're absolutely not needed. And since they take up memory and add to the complexity of the operating system, they actually do more harm than good. The bottom line: If you're using System 7 on a Macintosh, you need a memory manager. But if you're using a modern OS, such as Windows NT/2000/XP, Mac OS X, or a flavor of Unix, you should forget that memory manager. "

I have a memory manager on my win98 machine & it does make a big difference, sometimes it frees up 50-60 meg which poser likes to hold onto even after shutting it down. I just tried the same thing on WinXP after a session with poser & it freed up 1meg the rest Windows handled itself, Microsoft did get something right at last :)

I have 512mb of RAM and I still get Low Virtual memory messages when rendering in Poser. I do have Windows XP. Any suggestions on what the Min and Max paging file sizes should be set at? I did have it at 50/500, I just increased it to 500/1000. I have a lot of hard drive space so that won't be a problem.

c1rcle,which memory manager are you using on your win98 machine? is there any down side to using it?

I've got Memturbo on my Win98 machine. Saves me from lockups all the time. It was money very well spent and I hate spending money.

My opinion about memormy managers and other "tweaky" things: If your computer is working good, you're not getting error messages, the OS is not crashing a lot, runs your programs and does so quickly enough, then leave it alone. I've never really given a hoot how much memory my computer was using or anything else it was doing in the background so long as it runs my programs. I see so many posts (not this one but elsewhere) where people are running 10 things on their task bar to track this that and the other. They're not having a specific problem in many cases, but get really freaked out if they see memory surges and the like. Frankly, I think if they just turned all that task bar crap off (all those processes running on the task bar use a lot of memory), they would find that their computer runs faster and better. This is just my opinion mind you and not meant to start a war with those who are getting error messages or who are computer professionals and know how to use these things correctly.

Kate the Shrew reccommended Cacheman to me last year, it's very good, & free.

Bottom line = Install the minimum. Run the minimum. Sandpoppe is right. People who install every new piece of junk that comes along and run it all in the background can only expect problems. I run NOTHING but the apps I'm using, usually poser max, uv mapper and cr2Editor. No firewalls, browsers, games, screensavers, clocks or other junk. And I don't surf and work at the same time. I use an ancient 166Mhz for the net, which you could buy nowadays for about 2 cents and a toffee-apple. Works just fine. And every extraneous piece of windows crap is disabled. mac

memturbo for me too :) but I shut everything down these days when running poser just in case.

Oh, I've got all the background apps shut down too. But when the memory is gone, and any kind of ambitious, multi-figure render in Poser will suck it all up, it's gone. You either have a utility that can recover a sufficient amount of RAM on the fly, or you crash. It's as simple as that. :O)

I found that it really does depend on your app. At work we use Lotus Notes for email, enteprise crap IMO, but you use what you're given. I habitually used a memory manager, even on XP with 256Mb of memory, because I found that with the apps I had to have open, if I wanted to use quicktime or anything else like that then it would corrupt system memory used for system icons, etc. and then the whole system would get slower. Happens after a week anyway, regardless of what they say about realiability. But having decided to move the OS into RAM in a hope of getting better response times, I discovered a problem a few days in, it seemed to be even slower, then I realised I'd forgotten to get rid of the the memory manager (RAMidle XP) which loaded at boot, and XP hid, because it's not an "active" application, (meaning it doesn't update the icon in the task bar...) Once I'd gotten rid of that, then all was smooth again. At least untill I loaded quicktime, when it again killed the icons, but the machine didn't grind to halt afterwards, and continues to be responsive, so I consider this a small victory, YMMV :) later jb

I believe everyone should at least have Windows 2000 or Windows XP Home Edition. And if we're doing graphics, 512MB of memory is a good working start. Let's not forget that graphics stuff consumes hard drive space. My 30GB hard drive is almost filled with the Poser installation alone. Oh, yes, those of us with older computers face handicaps. I can't go over 512MB RAM because of my BIOS. Other people's computers may not be able to handle Windows XP. But we eventually look at what we want to accomplish, and face the fact that upgrades are necessary. Then we try to find the funds to do just that.