Assembly? Bah! OK for those of you spoiled with an assembler I suppose - I used to have to enter my code into a "hex loader" into a ZX81 - so I'd write the assmebly by hand and convert it to hex in a notebook before typing in the hex code. Now THAT is programming! (wrote a couple of games that way, among other things). WTB: The computer industry tells the truth in much the same way as politicians do. They tell the parts of the truth from the angle which will make such "truths" most effective/appealing to you. They simply ommit any facts that would be unappealing. The overall effect is much the same as if they lie big time. I'm in the industry, and they lie to me too :( I've really enjoyed some of the stuff you've given the community for free WTB (Buffy, Spike) so I want you to enjoy your new PC and do more with it, happily - I do NOT want to devestated and going "well yeah it's faster, but not THAT MUCH!". A realistic appraisal beforehand should hopefully have you enjoying the new speed instead of cursing it for not being what you'd like. Windows is A cause of slowness, as is the Mac-ported code for Poser. It's not up-to-date and frankly doesn't benefit from even the optimisations in newer compilers. Even using newer compilers presents problems, as optimising for the newest, fastest CPU usually means that a program wil lrun *even slower) on an older CPU - so should a programmer optimise for slower CPUs and have a slower top-end but a more level playing field, or should he compile to produce the fastest results on the fastest computers and leave legacy users "in the lurch"? Problems, problems... certainly if you triple the speed of various components AND upgrade the software to a model which makes use of updated CPU instructions/optimisations then one can see more than a tripling of speed. The general case however in the real world of Window suse is that just replacing the hardware does not perform miracles - not even the ones that simple math suggests should happen :( Upgrading from Windows 2000 Pro to Windows XP Pro would not result in speed improvements - quite the reverse. A number of people who have done so have stripped XP down as much as possible. While Win2000 is a very different beast from Win98 (one is basically Windows NT 5 while the other is basically Windows 95 ver E). If you strip enough out of WinXP is basically becomes Windows 2000 Pro, so you have improved memory management etc... but as far as I'm concerned there's not a huge benefit in upgrading from 2K to XP just to downgrade your XP installation - especially given the Pace-like copy protection built into all XP products. Cheers, Cliff