Everything seems to take forever to load anymore. Just started Poser, loaded V3...injecting head and bdy morphs..the full deal...but the head has now been loading for quite some time...used to take just a short while. Everything seems to be getting that way...too much stuff in the runtime????

nope, everyone leason, the reason Poser 5 gets so slow is because its eating up the computer's background memory, without that you can't even open a folder because there's no background memory, rebooting all ways fixes this and restores the background memory to normal levels. if this doesn't work, try not rendering so much morphs, thats the only other answer i can give you sorry:)

the troubling thing, even if I reboot, it is still way slower than it was even a few weeks ago. Maybe I have some ram that is failing???

??? RAM that is failing? hmm... is that the only thing being run. whats your system RAM, Monitor Resolution, and your hard disk Space, these are very important. replay as soon as you get this.

My usual way I run Poser5 is to be using it...setting up, loading characters, etc....I normally have no problems with loading textures, morphs, or whatever...usually load all morphs into V3....that way I don't have to guess if I have what I want??? Then I will use Outlook Express, or surf during render, even sometimes have PSP7 open and do work on other stuff. I've been doing it this way for months. Yestersay I cleaned up my hard drive, defragged, etc..no help. I do bot cleaning nearly everyday... My system, while not super, has never had these slow down problemms in Poser before. WinXP Home AMD 1800+ CPu 512 meg ram 100gig HD with 40gig free...and defragged just yesterday. I have my virtual memory set to 2048meg, which may not be ideal, but it has been that way for nearly 2 years. monitor is set at 1024x768...and this is how it always as been as well

check the render options, oh, when i do other things while the program renders, it get so slow, but when i just have Poser 5 running while it renders, it is much faster.

if its just poser that's slowing down then i dunt have any idea whats wrong.......if you have other programs that run slow too maybe you have a computer virus....have you tried running antivirus? get a new AV if you have an existing one (even if it updates automatically) cuz you may have a virus that cant be detected by your existing AV that another AV can.

well, it seems that most stuff is ok, although I've been mainly using Poser lately... Rendering isn't all that bad...its loading figures, textures and stuff that is way slow... it is almost like the program is locked, but it will eventually clear out if I wait long enough..and I'm talking 5-10 minutes.

clean off your hdd. Get rid of junk you don't need. Your whole machine will run faster if your hdd is about half empty (or full whichever you prefer s)

I agree with movida. A harddrive on any computer, once it is over half full does run noticeably slower, at least that's been my experience. I just cleared a bunch of stuff off of mine (it was a little over half full) and the entire OS and all program run faster. I've heard that spyware can slow things down dramatically. You might want to check and see if any has gotten through. Before I got XP Pro, I would to a complete reformat about once a year, just because the registry of the Win 9x boxes always got very "junky" after that long. I'm not sure that's as much of an issue with XP.

Forgot to mention......since you have XP Dave-So, background memory should not be an issue. XP, unlike earlier versions of Windows manages memory totally differently. Once an app is closed, the memory is freed up. The old 9x systems could never recover memory the way XP does and reboots were necessary at least once a day. XP interfaces with programs more like Linux than it does the earlier 9x versions. The result is a more stable OS and virtually no OS crashes (the blue screen of death in the old 9x systems). The only time I reboot XP is when required to do so by Norton or some Microsoft update patches or I've turned off the computer. Once of the things I really like about XP when running Poser, is that if I'm rendering a memory intensive scene, it will literally free up memory by shutting off background services and allocate more memory to Poser.

How many addons have you installed into the main poser5 Runtime? I found in the past that poser5 gets very slow if there's anything other than the standard stuff in there.

I agree with c1rcle. Try pruning your main runtime. Poser 5 really slows down if you have too much stuff in the main Poser 5 runtime. Set up some alternate runtimes, if you haven't already, and move some stuff there. (I've got one for older stuff called Poser 4, one for V3, one for M3, one called Downloads (for add-ons I use regularly) and one called Special (for stuff I use only once in awhile). Also, after you've finished organizing and decluttering your hard drive, defrag it. Defragging really makes a big difference for Poser.

thanks sandoppe, i never welly thought about that, you have a very good point:)

XP isn't supposed to have the same memory problems as 95 and 98...but IME, with Poser 5, it does. I have XP, and I have to save my work and shut down Poser every once in awhile, or it gets ridiculously slow, or even locks up. Sometimes I have to reboot. After that, it's fine. Rendering in particular seems to cause some kind of memory problem if you do it too much without shutting down Poser once in awhile.

Have you run CorrectReference on your Poser installation? Poser will run faster when you do. You can find CorrectReference in Free Stuff. Do you have Norton Utilities? Norton's Speed Disk does a far better job of defragging your hard drive, and keeping you computer in good running order. You'll get far better performance with Mike 3 & Vicky 3 if you only load the morphs you plan to use.

I don't doubt what you're saying randym77, I just have not had that experience. It could be that we use Poser differently and that accounts for me not having the kind of memory drag you're talking about. It will sometimes take a few minutes, but XP manages to recover the memory for me without the need to reboot. Poser 5 is stubborn for sure and more persistent than other programs,but XP has managed to "figure out" how to tame the wild beast.....at least on my machine :) I also agree with multiple runtimes.....but have found that everything goes a lot faster if you put all the textures for all runtimes, in the main runtime. At first, I had the textures located in each runtime. I found that it seemed to take Poser a long time to find the textures.......so I moved all textures into the main runtime and speed improved considerably. And of course, geometries are also all in the main runtime. Finally, any character that uses the delta/hide folders (V3, M3, some of DNA's products) work best in the main runtime as well. My main runtime is exclusively P5 stuff and the V3/M3/Microcosm stuff, plus all geometries and all textures. Once Poser loads the first time, working with characters and rendering to pretty quickly.

It's not just memory drag -- it reaches the point that Poser 5 stops working. For example, I'll open a file, and it will act like the file is open, but I won't see it. (Nothing in the document window, or no document window at all. Close Poser, open the file again, and everything's fine.) Or I'll try to apply a pose, change a morph dial, or apply a prop, and nothing will happen. Again, closing Poser and getting back in fixes it. I don't think it's a Windows XP problem, because most of the time, I can run for weeks without re-booting. The only program besides Poser 5 that needs shutting down occasionally to fix memory issues is AOL 9. :-P FWIW, I've noticed it's mostly a problem when I'm working in very large files. For example, using several V3s, M3s, the MilCat, and textured mansion. Every once in a while I had to shut Poser down, or it would just stop working.

Dave-So, if it's getting slower, rather than always having been that slow, then it has to be something that's changed. NT does have better memory management than 9x, but Poser's is so bad, that even NT can't fully contain it. But likely cause is that your swap file is getting too large and/or too fragmented. As was noted above M$ Defragger on NT is nothing like their Defragger on 9x. It takes a minimalist approach. It attempts to free up larger contiguous areas for new file's use, but does minimal effort on already fragmented ones. You'll need to run a 3rd Party one - SpeedDisk - to really clean up already fragmented files - like your swap file. Also check that your swap file isn't unnecessarily big. There is a school of thought that there's little reason to go much over 2GB total INCLUDING your real memory (i.e. with 1GB real memory I keep my swap limited to 960MB). After all no single 32-bit Window's application can access more than 2GB of memory store - although that won't stop Poser5 trying, with predictable results.

I've been having the same problems as Dave-So. P5 just keeps getting slower and slower. I've even reinstalled the program, no luck. I finally gave up and reinstalled Poser Pro and use that for regular posing, etc and I use a stripped down P5 just for rendering. I never liked P5: the material editor is bewildering and it is the slowest program I have ever used, and I have a very fast computer.

Well, I truly appreciate all the advice :) I only have the defrag utility on XP...but I used to use Norton, and it put the swap file at the beginning of the drive..always..also put most heavily used programs up front...very nice, and it worked very well. My P5 runtime is huge, let alone many 3rd party items :) try 5.6gig worth of huge...I'm a Poser junkie.... But belonginging to every club around, and downloading most of it...hey, I paid for it all, better get it...and all the free stuff that I just can't do without..well, its huge.... It seems I should split up the runtime..but asked here a coupl eof times on what HAS to stay in the main runtime and which categories have to be correct...still not sure. Apparently M3/V3 have to reside in the main, microcosm was mentioned...not sure if there is anything else..guess I could try it and see what happens...probably should take a couple of weeks vacation..:) I'm also thinking of what I may have done recently as far as OS...I routinely download the updates fro the MS site, and there have been quite a few lately, so its possible one of them or more didn't agree with Poser 5..... maybe an updated dll or something...

Well Dave-So.....my P5 runtime (the main one) is 7.57 Gig :) All of Poser is close to 10 gig. Since the only time Poser is extremely slow for me, is when I first start it (takes forever), I don't think the size of the runtime is that significant. There was one of the Microsoft updates that was reported (and acknowledged by Microsoft) to create slow down problems on some machines. But it wasn't program specific. In terms of what has to stay in your main runtime.....any item that relys on those special "delta" folders that both DAZ and DNA use for a few of their products. I think LaRoo might be affected by it as well. They reside in the libraries folder along with your normal library folders, and are called: !DAZ, !DNA and Micro. They have to be in the main runtime and cannot be moved from that location in the libraries. So I just leave the characters that rely on them in the main runtime as well.

Ok..thanks :) 7 gig? Now I don't feel so bad ...that might be a good poll question...I think I'll post it :)