I picked up this observation in a WooYah thread and thought I'd see what you guys think. I often use P5 while disconnected and I'm desperately trying to remember if the times I think P5 is slow is while I've been connected.

The more programs I have open, the slower Poser 5 works. And that seems to include the Internet.

I only had a problem when I tried to access http://www.. it tried to download the whole Internet. I had to disconnect before I got sucked in.

"I only had a problem when I tried to access http://www.. it tried to download the whole Internet. I had to disconnect before I got sucked in." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I think if your processor is slow enough (significantly under 1 GHz) you will notice even with 56K, but with a processor of 2GHz or over the only time you would notice, even with broadband, is when doing something like downloading a lot of PDFs and/or photos and/or streaming audio/video. Dale LaRoy Splitstone

LOL- Like that www.. gag. Say you are not doing anything over the connection, you just have a connection open when you are using Poser5. Just wondered if anyone noticed a reduction in speed. Could Poser 5 be doing something like looking for other users with the same licence code, for example, which knocks performance.

Poser 4 accesses the net all the time unless you block it ... very irritating. No idea what its looking for. I would imagine that Poser 5 might be doing the same .. but I do not have it installed on a mahcine with net access so I'm not sure.

Lyrra - How does one block Poser's access to the 'net?? If it can be done, does it affect the program in any way? Jeez... -Nancy.

• "How does one block Poser's access to the 'net??" I use Zone Alarm. When any programs, including Poser, try to access, I have the choice to allow it or block it. see ZoneLabs. There's a free version available.

I use Zone Alarm to block it. I have no idea what affect it has on Poser ... it doesn't seem any more or less tempermental lol

Thanks, JV + Lyrra I use Black Ice PC and Application protection and while I love it, I don't think it has a feature like that. I'll check out Zone Alarm. -Nancy.

Lyrra; All Poser is doing is checking to see if there is another copy running on the local network that has the same registration code. This was to prevent many people from sharing one copy. And all you have to do is block it with any firewall; I use Norton's. Poser interprets that as 'No Other Copy Found' and so does not get pissy about it. Supposedly, this will cause the first incident of Poser to deactivate any others running at the same time, but I haven't tried it to see if it works.

Dale thats good to know. I just have this unreasonable paranoia about programs trying to talk to the net without asking me first :) So do you think that this might casue slowdown in Poser? do you know if P5 does this as well?

P5 definitely goes out and checks tcp/ip. I have lan and cable and even though i am running just the firefly render of something i developed on the laptop (not enough power to firefly on laptop) on my desktop... It knows if I am using laptop P5 at same time and shuts it down when the firefly render is complete. So during rendering doesnt check as soon as it is done it does - my firewall has not shown it attempting to look out to the net though.

You and me both.... ;) I haven't had any apparent slowdown due to this, either in P4 or P5 (of course I have CL webstuff blocked off as well). About the only times I have slow down issues is when I fill my physical memory and Poser has to start hitting the ol' swap file. I have a freeware app called Cacheman on my Win2k system; what it does it scour through your system's memory and reclaim space from files and file handles that Windows (any flavor; talk about the eternal bug...) leaves behind. Anything that is in active use it leaves alone. For any of the 9X OS's, it's pretty much a neccessity; the NT based versions of Windows are somewhat better at cleaning up after themselves. It doesn't interfere with Poser, or Vue 4 running a long network render, and it gets along with Norton's AV suite. There are others, but this is the one I use.

I wish people would stop referring to Windows caching as a BUG. It's not. It's a choice. Lower your vcache if you don't want Windows leaving stuff in memory for you to use again later. Try this. Reboot. Run Poser. See how long it takes to load up? Close Poser. Run it again. Pop..it's right there. That's Windows caching 'bug' which is not a bug. All these memory manager programs do is clean out this memory cache. They're fine. Use 'em if you want. But under Win98 I had more memory free by lowering my vcache than using a cache manager. Not much more ;) but it was more.