OK , I decided to take the plunge, despite the lack of a decent demo. I am now pretty dissapointed. P5 has a lot of great features, (hair and mats etc) but does it crash on anyone else as much as me? It seems to crash without warning on large scenes. I am using p4 2.4ghs with 512mb and winXP. Usually I can't crash XP even by trying, P5 has no problem.

It doesn't crash on me so much as it slows to a dead stop on renders (Firefly). Do you have the newest patches? That helped me (thought, clearly, I still have problems....but not usually crashes). I'm sure other people have better advice. Why Poser 5 works so beautifully for some people and gives so much trouble to others with the same system is a mystery to me.

I have the SR3 patch on

Check how much free hard drive you have for virtual mem. I am using p4 2.8 1g and vmem set to initial 4096 to max4096 (Quik reminder: Start | Control Panel | System | Advanced | Settings btn under performance | Advanced tab | Virtual memory Change btn then set custom to 4096/4096 on a nice harddrive with free space). I have monitored my renders - and can guarantee you that a clean disk with lots of harddrive is very very important to keep the Render Firefly Production going [no lockup] - so assume that when you go to hair/mat/etc - it is grabbing harddisk with the texture/smooth shaded display on. Once a week I do a defrag on all drives on xppros from admin tools as they get well used by office and all 3d programs. Good Luck and by all means make sure you are running the sr2.1 at least (sr3 works on 98 laptop but been 2 chicken to try on XPpro)

I'm using P5 here, and since 2.1, and now sr3, it never really crashes. In fact, I'm not sure the last time it did crash. I'm also using memturbo, which will defrag and replace your ram on the fly. I've noticed a bit help from that. Oh, and using XP home here as well.

I have about 100gig spare on my hd.

I can say that I have only had it crash on me a couple of times, but I was pushing it. I went for the maximum settings on just about everything. I had 3 lots of hair, due to there being 3 models in there. I also had some global lighting, dozens of lights scattered around the scene. Do you still have all the fancy animations and themes switched on in XP? Try it without them on (i.e go to a classic but boring look), it can speed things up a bit.

Mine only crashed once, but she runs very slowly now. Takes about 5 min to boot up, about 3 min to load a figure, and about 1.5 min each to load a pose, hair, and clothing. Renders pretty fast, but I only do simple scenes.

"Slowing down" and "Crashing" are two different things. So which is it? P5 can sometimes look like it is frozen when it is not - you need to be patient and not push the panic button too quick or you will make it crash when it was just "thinking". Also remember that some of the new handy features in P5 (dynamic hair and cloth etc) can take a LONG time to process and render. Also products are coming to the market with HUGE texture maps which can further cause what seems like a system slowdown. Downsize your textures and you will see a huge jump in render speed. If your final render is 1024x768 you hardly need a 4000x4000 body texture unless you are examining the lint in Vic's navel. Win XP on a Pentium 4 provide the most stable Win Platform yet, but with all the eye candy turned on even with a 2.4GHz processor, it will slow down your apps to about the same speed as they are on a P3 850 MHz machine. Finally learn about the differences between Firefly and P4 rendering. There are a lot of things you can control in Firefly that were not available in P4. Learning how to use these features will speed up your renders and minimize lock-ups in Poser. Other things that cause Poser 5 to lock-up but are NOT the fault of P5: Poorly made Mat Pose files for Poser 4 which have illegal text characters in them (I found that virtually ALL the early Python scripts for making MAT poses in PPP inject some non-printing characters in the file which will cause problems in P5 but seem to work fine in P4. Light sets with named lights developed on non-English language systems. Swapping to one of these light sets will often cause your first render attempt to freeze, and might crash Poser on loading the light set - beware of foreign lights ;-) Textures over 2000x2000 - use them with extreme caution, and avoid using several in one scene. Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Outlook and Outlook Express - having these open for long periods of time while using Poser will eventually cause Poser to freeze. Don't blame Poser for this - tell Bill Gates. Aggressive Anti-Virus programs - these days we all need good AV protection. Unfortunately the trade-off with these powerful AVs is very poor system performance, and occasional instability. Turn OFF your AntiVirus (or in particular, the process known as System Scanning) while using Poser and you will get greater stability in Poser. Try these things. On my 2.4 GHz P4 machine with Win XPh I have never had a system crash (where the entire system locks up) but I have had a few lock-ups in Poser which could ALL be traced back to one of the above problems. Typically I use Poser 12 hours a day and only have to reboot my XP machine about once a week. I reboot my Win 98 machines 1 or 2 times a day ;-0

Good summary ronstuff! I also found that "walking away" and letting it finish "thinking" was more often than not the solution :) Certainly agree with you on XP,the MAT files and "higher than needed for screen use", texture files! :) Lights in general are a problem. The Python script to delete lights solved that for me. I believe it's Ockams. Removing the lights before switching to new ones has saved a lot of "lock-ups" and frustration. My system has never locked up as a result of Poser. The ap had a lot of freeze ups before I started using the delete lights script. Very few now and most related to mats and textures. Oh....if you're rendering to a new screen, don't try to cancel out. That will usually result in a lock up for me. I have Poser patched through SR2. I have not installed SR3 simply because I don't have time to learn its foolish nuances.

OK Guys, thanks, I'll try tinkering with XP a bit, see if I can free up some resources. Maybe I'll go for walk next time it renders:)

It's my opinion that P5 is written with its internal priorities all skewed. Proper programming protocol puts hardware events at the top of the priority food chain. Poser really doesn't have any of these to deal with, as the OS looks after the disks, etc. The next thing should be the keyboard and mouse. Then should come the screen updates. Renders and draping should be at the very bottom, given the remaining cycles after all these other tasks are taken care of. Someone at CL seems to think this would hamper performance, but it won't. High priority tasks should be things that happen rarely. Things that take a long time should be at the bottom of the chain. At least that's what I've been trying to tell them. Right now, if you start a hair drape with collisions on in P5, then go run an email client for a while and come back to P5, the screen will not update and it will look like P5 is gibbled. It probably isn't, but it will look that way. In note I got today from tech support, they claimed that you shouldn't multitask with P5. That's code for they are still not willing to change the priorities....despite having been told about it several times now. But the program does work. It's just clunky. I'm getting beautiful results now that SR3 has fixed the hair collision problm. But I have to wait hours for them on this PIII-550. And Firefly is a real memory pig, but what renderer is not? This is especially true with dynamic hair in a picture. The answer is more RAM. As much as you can put in the machine!

agree with all the above. HAve crashed at least 150 times with this system I built. After all the changes made above, the one thing that really made a difference, and I mean 1 was adding 2gigs of memory. P5 of course sucks all that up as well, but I have not crashed once. 512 was not enough. It worked sometimes and fooled me. Los Alamos Comp. make good models to get ideas from