Hi, I'm getting really hacked off with Win98, I've got a 600Mhz Athalon and 256Mb of RAM, and the damn machine still locks up on me when opening pz3 files and occasionally before rendering.... I tried to load Vethrill, it locks, I tried to render P3WWG and it pops open the window and then hangs there.... Now admitedly it had been running for almost an entire day since the last reboot, and I had a few explorer windows open, but even so, I've got 256Mb of RAM, this shouldn't be a problem! Does anyone have the same problems, if so, what do you do about them? Does anyone know of a program for windows that will allow you to defrag and clean the memory of a running system, (or is that impossible?) Does this kind of thing happen on a Mac? Failing that is anyone willing to consider porting poser4 to Linux, I'm prepared to pay... In other news, I just bought Michael, hair, text and the '45 autoloader, I continue to be impressed by the Zygote store, it works. Now if only my machine would stay up long enough for me to play... Arrrgh! later jb

Well, with my really old machine (120Mhz, 96Megs RAM) sometimes poser4 locks while it don't find a needed file for a PZ3, but never the machine. I would suggest, install WinNT4.0 for Workgroups and you have the absolutely control over the machine. I work since two ears with two systems which have NT, at this time only 1 system-lock. SHARKEY

I installed 98 over NT, because in most cases 98 is preferable, more software works on it for a start, I don't have to login to it every time, etc. I just can't believe the O/S is this crap, they've only been writing the stuff for 15 years, it's not like it's new or untested or anything, and people wonder why I've avoided PC's all these years, This has never happened to me on a UNIX box, and the only time I've ever had a Mac crash on me was when I tried to import any image into word 98 for the Mac. I suppose what amazes me the most about all this is that people put up with it day in day out, the sun is bright, water is wet, windows is crap. later jb

I don't say NT is better then Win98, but it's a fact it's more stable and you have more control over the system. And by the way, the login had some good things, while you can surf on the net as a user which you have given really limited rules. (means smaller chances for hackers etc.) My son had Win98, and for my person the only thing which is better is Drag and drop. I never have problems while installing programms, everything works well. Just my opinion, but i'm shure your problems would gone or if not you can locate them easy with the manager-functions. SHARKEY

I'm with Robert here go with NT or win2k its much more stable and faster for graphics work.......I think the problem with windows stability is its wriiten to work with so much different hardware it would be impossible to work 100% of the time, be nice if it did though :o)......Steve

if you cannot use the old three finger salute... alt/ctrl/del to get out of the freeze up... it is your video card... or more specifically the video card drivers.. try going to the manufacturers web site and see if there is new updated drivers... for example DX 7 made the saveage chipsets unstable and prone to freezing,,, those chipsets are on many cards including all the Diamond Multimedia line. take a look at those drivers and see what;s up

Just plan to reboot 98 every 3 hours or so and you should be fine. I use Norton Utilities and it has a dandy defragger, and a fresh defrag always helps, however no defragger can operate whilst you simultaneously work. I defrag about once a week is all, and with Norton it only takes less than an hour.

I don't want to defrag the disk, I schedule that every night, I want something that cleans up memory, the O/S is as leaky as hell from what I can see I want something that will return memory to the "free" pool once it's been used. There are quite a few such utils for the mac, and UNIX doesn't need them, but I figure somebody must have written one for the PC... As for 98, I'm running a fully patched release 2. I don't want to run NT because half of my apps will stop running and W2k is a joke, it runs 20% slower on my machine, due to its pathetic attempt to keeps itself afloat. Supposedly they included technology to stop you having to reboot every three hours, but this involves a lot of internal plumbing that has to keep watch on itself, hence the slowdown. later jb

Hi jb Thanks for asking the question. I work for a Large Software Company, I'm off for the weekend, it's Friday the 13th and the moon is full. I cannot be held accountable for anything I might say. 'I suppose what amazes me the most about all this is that people put up with it day in day out, the sun is bright, water is wet, windows is crap.' You pretty much nailed it here. The basic existential dilema confronting your subset of humanity is M$ is a criminal enterprise, and corruption doesn't scale to Internet speeds. ....and, the software industry is gutted. It's a shadow of what it could be if M$ didn't reserve to itself innovation, as a right it might eventually choose to exercise (I'll grant them their mouse and a few flight simulators). But 47,000 viruses? Compared to, what?, 40 (non-M$ macro) viruses on the Mac and one on the Palm. The best suggestion might be your own, in the first post. Linux (free speech! free beer!) is metaphorically the partisans regrouping in the hills. Not necessarily for everyone. Another alternative would be OSX if your willing to make the forward migration back to the Mac. This is BSD Unix with a thin candy shell. The middle ground would be Eazel -- Linux done by some people who did the original Mac interface. Just tink for yourself, mon. As for crashes on the Mac? Sure, but the way I look at crashes is that integrated circuits operate so close to the quantum level, that your emotions and thought processes do not lack affect. If you're not in a centered mental state you just sit down at the computer and it crashes (well almost...)

Video cards, hmmm, interesting thought, it does lock occasionally to a point where only a hard reboot will do, and so far it's died twice so that I've had to boot into safe mode, and fire up explorer to download and re-install the graphics drivers. I'm running the latest set, (about 10 days was the last install) of the unified Nvidia drivers, I've got a Nvidia Riva TNT2 64 running at 1280 x 1024, in 32bit, I could go up to 1600 x 1200 and see if that changes anything I guess, failing that I'll drop back to 1024 x 768 and see if that's any better, though I'd still be interested in a Linux (or QNX, BeOS or BSD) port :)

You might want to check out MemTurbo for ram clean up. I have it set on auto, but before setting materials to a large bmp or jpg, or before rendering I run it just to make sure. I still get locked up once in a while, but not near as bad as when I didn't have it.

Praxis, Rambooster is what I use and it works very nicely for freeing up unused memory. http://www.sci.fi/~borg/rambooster/index.htm

Um, I dont claim to have read every word of the above,....but did you install the patch yet? Scarab <-oh, and the plug is out of the wall socket.... (tee hee!)

I'm up to 4.02, but I'm doing this from behind a firewall so I don't fancy using 4.03... Cheers for the link, I shall download and install. I'm now at 1600x1200 (I had to resize poser22's new wallpaper) everything looks very small now... later jb