hi guy+guys and other poser folk, I have had this problem for a while now, and its really starting to bug me, first of all I used to have my poser4 installed on a 200mhz+64ram..yup thats right!! and I never had this problem.. this is the problem, Ive recently bought myself a 2.4 ghz+256ram and gforce4 card..80gig hd... but since i put poser4 on it, 50% of the time it'll freeze.. it'll only freeze as soon as I press render.. and i know its frozen because the status-bar stays white permanatly!! (image) soo what causes this? im running poser4+propack+propack service3+ive tried the memory update thing too,,.. yup ok it does this when i have a lot of props+hair involved but with this machine?!!! any ideas would be appriciated! cheers ... :)

Try turning off bump maps in Render>Render options. Are you still using Win 95/98/Me? If so get 2000/XP (and preferably another 256MB of RAM, or more).

I turned my resolution (not dpi)down and it helped allot. And yes more RAM & XP.

ok cheers for the help :) im using a high resolution and win98se... !

Poser and 98 are never really happy together. My Poser used to lock up a lot in 98. Avoid ME at all costs, it's a joke of an operating system. 2000, NT and XP are all good with Poser, although you may run into the notorious "Not enough memory to render at the current resolution" error. There's a fix for it on the CL website.

well ive been working on a 100meg pz3 file which wouldn't render, I just changed the resolution and 'no bumps' and its actually rendered it!!! yayy cheers for the advice... :D

With an 80 GB hard drive you're best off using a drive partioning software and create a 10 GB second partition and move your swap file to that partition. If you can't do that invest a few more bucks into a second hard drive and use that for your swap file. Windows 98 and ME are notorious for not handling memory properly and "leaking" memory all over the place. XP and 2000 are better but 2000 has issues as well. There's a great tutorial at RDNA, (I'm sorry I don't remeber the thread but it wasn't that long ago), it was sent in for P5 but I used it last month when I started out on P4 and upgraded two weeks later to P5. It worked great. A bit involved and had to start all over but worked great when I moved from P4 to P5. Good Luck and I'll look for that thread and repost ASAP!

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=72272

Here it is!

lol. D-larsen, I am glad it worked for you :)

Yeah worked great and gave me a reason to upgrade to P5. Figured I desrved a treat after the wife through me out for spending to much time at the computer! Poetic justice, I think they call it!

If you got a new computer, but kept Windows 98, you're only "half the way there." Get Windows XP, and a total of at least 512MB RAm, and things will be much better.

I find that I can lock up the computer with a few complex objects, before I even start rendering. Memory seems to be the key, and Windows 98, I gather, isn't good at handling large amounts of memory. But later versions of Windows need more RAM for the OS. There's no easy answers.

Windows 98 will only recognize up to 512MB of RAM. Anything over that and it will not start up. You will get an error.

No, Win98 runs up to (I think) 1.5GB, and there may be a fix beyond that. However if you go over the .5GB you do need to add VCache settings to your startup file so that Windows doesn't end up using the whole of your RAM for caching directories (which is likely to happen if Poser goes looking for textures). This is discussed in a technote on the MS site. What you won't see, by my understanding, is significant improvement in the performance of a single application, though multi-tasking may improve. I certainly ran 98SE with 768MB RAM for several months.