I know this has been asked in many ways, but I will ask again. I would like to know from those that claim that they have no problems with Poser5. What is the configuration they are runing Poser under. I have now even gone to the length of installing a second copy of WinXP on my system. Completely clean. No sound card no modem no fancy video drivers no nothing. Dead standard no frills. I have a 1.8 GHz P4. 1Gb Rambus memory. 4Gb fixed dedicatet swap space on its own drive. At least 5Gb of free space on each of my drives. No screen saver or power saver features turned on. With SR4 I now get 109 frames renderd from a file that use to only give me 60 frames before it died. Not much of an inprovement. The file contains M2, V2, backdrop, Hair for each, 4 low res props and high res textures for each character. Is it just me?

Running an AMD XP2400 (2.0GHZ)CPU, 1GB DDR PC2100 2.5 Latency RAM, 30 GB C: Operating System and Base programs, 30 GB D: (Poser 4 and Poser 5) Installed here separate Runtimes, 30 GB E: (Swap File, System Managed) and backups of downloaded zip files, was NVidia 32 MB Video card-Now ATI Evil Commando2 128 MB video card, Windows XP SP1, Blank Screen Saver. Sorry, don't do animations yet will tackle that after I finish RHPS characters. Two days on SR4 no crashes, 2 crashes before that rendering under SR3 and P5 in a month, 12 Crashes under P4 in a month before that.

The system I'm currently using Poser 5 on has the following specs, hon: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ running at 2.0GHz 384MB of DDR RAM (I'm praying for an upgrade) HDD: 2 drives - 120 & 40. the 40 is in two partitions, the 120 in 3. 1 CDRW. All drives are NTFS format, with some compression on various folders. WindowsXP on a partition of 19GB, to which I install only MS apps (in this case, Office 2k, Office XP, Encarta, Picture It7, PhotoDraw 2.). There is a swap file of 512MB here. The second 19GB partition is dedicated to all the other programs I have installed. These are, specifically: Dramatica Pro, Storyview, Various Poser Utilities, Acid Pro 3, Acid Pro 4, Sound Forge 6, Vegas Video 4, Nero, CDRWin, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Authorware 7, Adobe Illustrator 9, Photoshop 6, Image ready 3, Gif movie gear, Image Composer 1.5, Fireworks MX, Your handwriting 2, Flash MX, Director MX, SwishMax, Videofactory 2, Nortons AV, WinRar, WinZip, OpenType Tools, My wacom tablet utilities, Quicktime, Winamp, MS Reader, WinDVD4, PowerDVD, Shockmachine, Shade 7, and the recent installation of the Rhino Trial. Windows has all current updates available. All my drivers are updated as of January 1st (I'm a tad behind). The second drive has a 5GB partition I skipped earlier -- so 4 partitions, my apologies -- that contains my temp directory, my VM swap file (set to 1024 minimum, 4096 maximum), my interent files, and, well, basically every temporary file windows or IE has goes there. It is a junk spot where I point everything to. Oh, and all my email from outlook goes here as well. I then have drive where I have installed my regular 3d stuff: Poser, Bryce, Carrara, more poser utilities, and the spot where I sort all my zips. It also has a toolbar that I created with shortcuts to all my most used programs. Next is a drive for my documents, which all my stuff points to. Nothing is stored in the windows drive except windows stuff, essentially. Last is a drive where I store all my loops, textures, 3d objects, and other miscellany that I use for resources when creating stuff. I have disabled services in Windows XP that are turned on by default that I do not need. I have disabled features in IE intended to make thing easier, the downside being that I cannot use java (which, I skipped, is installed to the windows drive). It works wonderfully for me. I also have several drives mapped to a separate computer, and on that computer is a copy of firebird that I also use via a shortcut on that toolbar mentioned earlier. I have a scanner (Canon) and a CF card reader, both USB, and a USB printer (HP) installed as well. My video card is an Nvidia Geforce2 Ti. (oh lord, listen to them laugh). I also have both an onboard and an adapter based IEEE1394 card for a total of 5 firewire ports I use with video. Mouse and keyboard are simple things, the old style with a ball and nothing fancy feature wise. Soundcard is an old SB Live 5.1. I think that covers about as thorough a configuration report on my system as I can think of. It's networked into a network of three clusters -- three immediately around it, the primary house server, and then the rest of the house of five, no, four pc's at the moment. The server runs 2k3. I do not, nor will I, run software that my experience has established produces instability in systems. It is only in my experience, as well -- some people need these programs to do their stuff. These includes browser add-ons, Netscape Navigator, Yahoo anything, ICQ, AIM (which I have installed on a different computer), Real Player, and various other little "helper" programs. It isn't anythign against any of theose other prgrams, either -- I simply have encountered primarily trouble with those programs specifically enough times that I will not use them myself. I hope this helps to anwer the question you asked specifically in the first place. For the second one, no, I don't think it's just you. However, I suggest you check your ImageIO folder and other odd runtime folders for temporary files and delete them -- especially any sort of shadow maps.

I'm using a Celeron 2.0GHz with 768MB RAM under XP Pro. Maybe it isn't a good idea to have a fixed swap file? Since 32bit operating systems only have a 4GB address space and Windows allows applications only to use 2GB each, I would think that 4GB swap are over the top.

Stewer -- for a single application, yes. The limitation is inculsive of windows itself, as well, so by allowing a larger swap file, you permit windows to grant Poser the full extent of the swap available to it, while still allowing for overhead within windows itself (necessary in XP when writing files to the drive) as well as other prgrams one might be running at the time. The VM doesn't actually have to be a fixed one, and the number needn't be that high, no. I use it as an example because it presents me with a smoother operation in my system, as windows is not always swift enough to increase it on it's own. Since In my case, I'm liable to have Poser, Acid, and a few utilities such as UVMapper and winamp running all at the same time, I need the larger swap file to ensure that I don't have hiccups and have to wait while windows adjusts for me in the middle of my mutli-tasking. Since the bulk of my programs all feed directly off the memory and VM, it works for me. Photoshop is an exception to this, as it does create it's own swap file for it's personal use, plus it utilizes the system resources. That's why I recommend and use a fixed VM. It sin't because windows does a bad job, it's because I tend to push my system harder than windows expects.

I am glad to see that people are actually responding to this post. I should maybe ask as well do any of you actually manage to render movies of more than a couple of frames without Poser locking up.

I do, frequently. The reason I wanted you to hunt up those files is those are what usually caused the lockup for me previously. Right after installing SR4, I rendered a scene of 300 frames with dynamics, wind, reflection and stupid shader tricks just to see what would happen. Took forever and a day (ie, all night) but it didn't crash :)

I'm running WinXP Pro 1+G of RAM 128k dedicated video NvediaGEForce 4600 Pentium 4 3 HD's 1=120G with all programs running off it..I have 55G open HD2 = backup of all sub folders for all programs HD3 = Backup of HD2 + some textures CD's fully loaded Only crash I've had is when Poser can't find a damn texture file. I will add while rendering or working in of my graphics programs I can't access the internet..well I can, but it's too slow & I have no patience LOL Plus it slows things beyond a snails pace. I have read with these graphic programs it's best to have at least 1/2 of you HD space available....So when I see I'm have reached that tilt point or gone TOO far beyond I start moving things around & deleting programs(freebies) That I've never used. Recently I just moved all of my Vue objects to a different HD. This has sped things up a bit. But I don't get crashes unless it's MY fault. Last crash was in Vue with close to 25million polys & 300+objects.

Thanks ynsaen. This is what I wanted to hear. Atleast it means I am not chasing after wind. I will try your sugetion.

I did not find much in temp files and no shadow maps. I even deleted any .dyn files, as none of mine has any real value. If possible could you give me some more specific file exstensions that I am looking for. If it was any other program than Poser I would not need to ask this, but with Poser you never know. Thank You.

Dual 1Ghz PIII's, 1GB RAM, About 20GB free on a single 60GB drive. Matrox 450 dual head. Win2k pro. Swap file set to 1.5GB min, 4GB max. Have never allowed Outlook/OE to run. Never use any form of IM, or file sharing (Kazaa type) programs. Never use IE. Don't play CDs, MP3s, video games, etc... Reboot before doing any major 3D work. I typically do 200-300 frame anims, and while it takes a long time it has not crashed since SP3 while doing it. I will often reboot after doing a long one, before doing another long one though, just to clean things out. Oh, I also regularly flush the temp folder. Scan for viruses & spyware weekly, and defrag monthly.

My humble system is an Intel Celeron 533 mhz, with builtin video chip, "sound card," & LAN and 512MB of SDRAM. Add to that a 20GB hard drive for Windows XP Home Edition, and all software except Poser stuff. Poser 4 & 5 reside happily on a new 120GB Maxtor hard drive, while a 40GB hard drive handles all my projects. I don't fiddle-faddle with Virtual memory, and I don't divide any hard drives into partitions. Everything works just fine, with no crashes in months or years. I keep hardware and software up-to-date. I can run several intensive applications at the same time. Yes, I'm a bit out-dated, and looking for the money to finally upgrade. But it's kinda funny so many folks with newer computers, and "more techie know-how" are having so many problems?!

1.7ghz, PIV Noblis with 1G DDR Ram, running XP Pro, SR1. One 40G Matxtor harddrive. Peripherals: an old USB 8200 series hp cd-writer, a 2.4ghz Linksys Wireless Access Point Router and DSL modem. NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 200 video card with 32mb ram, USB photo card reader, Liteon CD Rom, a standard floppy drive, Microsoft USB IntelliMouse Explorer, an ancient IBM keyboard, a 17" ViewSonic monitor, Intel Pro/100 VE Network card, A gneric USB hub, HP deskjet 960c USB printer. Sound card is built onto the motherboard. 350 Watt power supply. Other software besides Poser 5 SR3: PsP 8, Vue d'Esprit 4.2, Bryce 4, jpg optimizer, IE 6+, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Reader, Acrobat Reader, P3doExplorer, Animation Shop 3, Microsoft Front Page, WSFtp, Norton Security 2004, Stuffit 7.0, 3dWin4, Injection Pose Builder, Front Look and Swish. I don't run a lot of junk on the task bar, but do have an active desktop and some of the other XP bells and whistles. I have 4 runtimes. My entire Poser folder is 8.29 Gig. One runtime is strictly for the Millennium People and for the special files needed for injection of V3, M3 and RDNA Microcosm. I also keep all textures in this runtime. The other three are for: 1) Sets and other items needed to create an environment; 2) Fantasy characters and 3) Animals and Toonimals. I have one NTFS partition for everything. I clean the drive weekly and defrag as needed (I run the defrag monthly to check fragment status). I manually download updates from Microsoft, only after reading to see what they do. I install only the ones I need. I manually check for Norton Security (firewall and antivirus) every day. Like many others, I've had a few issues with Poser, but understand what makes it crash well enough to avoid doing those things :) I don't do really complex scenes with tons of characters......the max has been 4 characters, 5 props and maybe 5 environment figures. With the exception of Neftis hair, I can render without any problem in firefly. I render Neftis hair with the P4 renderer. There have been a couple of times when I've gotten the little yellow triangle warning from XP telling me that it was freeing up resources so I could finish my render (a very nice feature of XP Pro, I might add!). I have always been able to finish a render. The only crashes I've had have involved Poser's inability to find a texture or .bum file. I recently got rid of all the .bum files, downloaded and ran Correct Reference. I assume that will take care of that problem. It also increased the figure and prop loading considerably! The other thing that caused crashes was trying to load multiple light sets. I downloaded a python script by agiel called "reset lights" and got rid of that problem! The only other crashes I've experienced were caused when trying to open a .pz3 scene file after removing or moving some of the figures or props that were used in that scene and when trying to cancel a rendering process in a new window and in production mode. Solution for these: I quit doing what causes the problem! :) My only current beef is that Poser 5 is still way slower than any software program has a right to be! :) And from what I've read, I'm not sure SR4 has improved that much!

AMD 2100+, 1GByte 333 DDRAM, GeForce Ti4200, 1HD (80 GByte) +1HD (160GByte). Win XP Pro. Still running with SR3 (German Version). Didn't have any problems until yet. Poser uses a lot of CPU power. I had big problems with Poser4 in the beginning on my new PC, because of overheat (CPU cooler only worked sporadically). No other application caused me troubles at that time. So have a look at your mainboard and CPU temperature as a pre-caution.

Lessee; Athlon 64 3000+ Gigabyte K8VNXP motherboard 1gig Kingston ValueRam EVGA Geforce4 Ti-4400 with older drivers (still fitting out the new system, and taking it slow) Using the AC-97 sound codec on the board, as my Audigy is preventing system boot for some reason. Haven't tested it in another system yet, so don't know if it's the card or the PCI bus... 5 HDD's (4 PATA and 1 SATA for .53 terabytes, 3 are NTFS (including the P5 install) and 2 are still FAT 32) on the RAID controllers on the mainboard, with a CD-DVD-r on IDE 2 and and Sony DVD+- DVD recorder on IDE 1. 8 in 1 flash media reader on USB. Win2kPro SP2, no further fixes as of yet. I ran a test dynamic yesterday, and until the hand caught and violated the skirt geometry around frame 268, it was calculating things just fine.

A Mac

IBM Thinkpad R40, Mobile Pentium 4M 1.8ghz; 640MB Ram (512 = 128) 20GB HD. Don't know why it runs problem-free for me, just lucky, I guess...

AMD64 FX51 with 2gb RAM. But had no problems on my AMD 1800 either. (1.2gb RAM) Same graphics card (GeForce Ti4800 128mb RAM) as before. WinXP Pro, previously Win2K Pro.

The guys at maingear.com put this one together for me. P4 2.8GHZ with HT 1 gig ram I am running 3 260gig hard drives dvd burner geforce 4 card built in sound lots of stuff hanging off via usb (webcams, video editors and so on) I pretty much never drfrag my drives, run all NTFS partitions. I do not run in administrator mode to avoid most virus danger as well as running a good firewall too. I am ALWAYS running Outlook, photoshop CS, MyIE2 (tabbed browser extentsion for IE) with 30+ open web pages and usually Max, Maya or Poser. Rock solid, day in, day out. It was great with Sr3, it is better with Sr4. And yes, I frequently do animatiosn in Poser with hundreds of frames for dynamics tests on a project I have in the works.

I should note that CL mentions in the latest SR that there used to be a problem during animations about not clearing shadow maps... this would explain the lockups and slowdowns when rendering anims. Apparantly, SR4 clears that up.

My appologies for going a bit OT, but I just noticed the partitioning that ynsaen is doing.....sounds like the configuration for a Linux box! :) A number of years ago, I tried the partitioning thing on a PIII and Windows 98. It never worked right.....I ended up with more errors and problems than I ever solved. I'm wondering though, if my problems back then had more to do with how the Windows 9X systems interfaced with the software vs. how XP interfaces. XP is much more like Linux/Unix in its memory management and the way in which it interfaces with software. Just curious.

Um. Personally..? Win2K is a lot less resource hungry than XP and (in my experience) more stable too. Same OS without all the gunk and junk. Yes XP has some features and 'improvements' over Win2K but I have never - and I've used Win2K from day 1 - had a single problem with it. I am still running Win2K on my P3 600. The only reason this box has xp on it is because I need to get used to the OS for work where I was bludgeoned into rolling out XP Pro (instead of Win2K as planned) on 700 machines (some of which are Celeron 400's with 256mb RAM - I leave you to draw your own conclusion as to whether they will survive.) Not fun...

Silke, I think your right about resources regarding W2k, but you can improve XP a lot by stripping a lot of things away. You need some nice little tools to manipulate the registry and turn certain fancy animation and services off that run in the background. But if your Win2k works and you don't need XP features like USB2.0 just stick to it.

Oh my god, I can't believe someone who considers him/herself an "expert" almost never defrags a hard drive?!

Ok, sorry for the delay Ultrop -- been busy as all get out. The file extension is *.tmp, and it can float around in the runtime depending on where Poser sorta settles, but it sounds like you got them. As noted earlier, if you have a collision with a moving object during a dynamic calculation, you can tear the geom of the object apart and also totally skew the anim -- I've locked it before myself doing that. Next suggestion would be to make sure you have acceptable memory for the option -- the largest anim chunk I can render at this time with my current settings is around 800 frames, but I rarely do more than about 350 (I even plan my shots around it). Sandoppe -- fantastic observation on your part, lol. I've been doing this a long while, and my experience has been that you never treat a workstation like a server, or a server like a workstation, lol. And partitioning on workstations is always more stable. Plus the added benefit of rapid changeover and mutliple configs. Dates back to Unix and FreeBSD for me. And it works awesome on BeOS 4 and 5, too, as well as, um (dare I say it? yes!) O/S2 Warp! Bobbi -- actually, a lot of pros rarely defrag their drives, especially if they deal with multimedia files. And I should note that's a "rarely", and not a "never", despite his method of putting it, lol. The catch is that they also never move things: anything that changes is always in one spot, like my method of having all my swap files, temp files, and other detrius in a single location, and all my resources in another. I'm a pro, and I defrag anything that changes religiously. I don't need to defrag my resources often because the files aren't fragmenting. While it's strictly a guess, I'll bet he has a large area that all his work is done in, and that when he's done, he cleans it up very nicely... Silke - XP and 2K are the same underlying kernal and core aspects -- they are equally stable in that regard, and if it works, there is no reason to change. My last big task before I sold out was a 430 unit changeover from a mixed Unix/95/98/Mac group to a solid 2k pro/server combo, and despite not wanting to, I had to set up AD, as well. I feel for ya. Oh yeah, I feel for you hard! (although if you can, get them to go 2k3 on the servers. Won't do squat for them, truly, but boy, will it make your life easier!)

"Oh my god, I can't believe someone who considers him/herself an "expert" almost never defrags a hard drive?!"

For me the reality is that in my situation defragging isn't necessary. My OS lives on it's own partition and is almost completely unfragmented because there is very little data writing happening to that partition. Similarly the drive I store my software on doesn't fragment a whole lot because the installs are fundamentally linear in nature as to their writing.

There are only two partitions that get thrashed in the way that would require defragmenting, and in neither case is there much point to it. The drive I keep my personal data on (Outlook files, My documents and so on) does fragment all to hell... but if I defragged it tonight it would be trashed tomorrow as soon as I started using the drive, it's basically pointless. Similarly, the large partition I use for video editing and animation rendering gets written with huge files that are created and destroyed fairly often... there is rarely a purpose to the defragmentation as again the drive would get trashed in short order. The large files tend to be similarly sized so they rarely micro fragment.

These days drive fragmentation is an issue of read/write performance, and not stability. My XP box is rock solid no matter how fragmented the data it is using gets... if I see an extreme slowdown I might defrag it, but that hasn't happened in more than a year. Thanks to firewire, packet writing DVD drives and a fast drive bus I never drop a frame, burn a coaster or whatever and the render times on my 3D work is generally so long with GI and so on that the time to write a frame isn't a factor.

It's all about partition planning. All but two of my partitions change rarely if ever and are extremely "clean" linear lay downs of the software and data I use. It lets me avoid a lot of the defrag cycle :)

Wow! Lotsa good responses folks! My experience has been mostly trouble-free with Poser4.0.3 and PoserPP. If it can't find a texture or bum file, I tell it to stop looking (no crashes yet). However, if I do animation I can't anti-alias and here's why... Gateway PII @ 350Mhz 512 Mb RAM video and audio on motherboard One ATI/IDE for additional HD sockets 4 HDs all dual partitioned 60G - 20 for Win98 / 40 for WinXP 60G - 30 for audio projects / 30 for video projects 30G - 15 for photos and Poser freebies / 15 for MP3's 4G - 2 for Posette stuff / 2 for V3 External USB hub running printer, 100M zip drive, scanner and a DM2 dj mixer. One CD R/RW drive and one DVD/ROM drive. I think the key to this system working well has been the use of 8 cooling fans in the aluminum tower that I use. Computers LOVE the cold. As for ProPack, it runs a lot slower than P4 but, still no crashes. Yep, the render times are pathetic but, this old machine seems to be more stable than most Pentium4 class computers that I've seen lately. The trade off is no Poser5 or DAZ Studio until I upgrade. Keep in mind that I can run Photoshop 7, Poser 4(orPP) and Winamp all at once and still render. Oh, and I also play Sprider or Freecell while waiting for the render to finish. I don't know why these newer computers have so many problems but, no complaints here :) CyberscapE