I was using poser and getting mighty irritated that with a pc that had 1.5 gig of ram & big harddrive I was getting messages saying insufficient space etc all the time. Then the light switched on and in control panel/ system/advanced I checked how much hard drive space was allocated as virtual memory to the drive that had poser on it. Turns out I was only allocating 300 mb : ( a quick change to the number and no more problem

That extra zero makes a big difference ;-)

It's like a bad horror movie ...you just think it's dead. Don't go in the cellar!

Oh, okay. I'm just going out to the garage. I'll be right back.

This still doesn't answer the question on why Poser needs 300M of virtual memory when you've got 1.5G of real, physical memory. You have roughly 5x more real memory available, but adjusting the virtual memory makes a difference??

Although tat wasn't the question, here you go: Because it wasn't written to do so, and becuase even if it were, windows would not allow it to do so. Complex operations involved in performing the tasks to which Poser (and most other digital arts applications) are applied are quite RAM intensive at times, and Will be used according tot he most efficient method possible without interfering with other applications. RAM is used first. THe moment RAM is "full", windows, rather than simply telling you "no, you can't do that", shunts chunks of information in RAM to the hard drive in a set location that it is familiar with (and which you can set the size and location of) that is called the "page file" or "swap file". If there is not enough room in BOTH the RAM and the pagefile, then you get the message out of memory. When this happens, the reasonable person will adjust their swapfile up beyond the point of their RAM, so that there is enough space to dump what ever process happens to be running at that time into it (in other words, enough space to store the entire uncompressed file that's already in RAM). Which is what was done. Virtual memory (the pagefile/swapfile) makes a huge difference, as it acts as, literally, extra RAM. If his system had RAM of 8GB, then it's possible he wouldn't have needed much of that swapfile. But since a poser scene can gets quite large (124 jpg tetures, 13 V3's, poser itself, 24 materials, dozens of props) it sorta happens that it will fill ram quite fast.

thanks for the info ynsaen.