hi, I have been trying to do some work in my poser 5 program and have been having over 6 figures in the pictures, but am running into a problem with a low on virtual memory message popping up when I start to render the picture. How can I increase the virtual memory? My computer has a 1.2 GHz and 512 RAM and Win XP so it is a powerful machine, but do I need to add a new memory card or something?

You need real (dimm) memory, unfortunately. 512 will not do it unless you do 2 figures at a time. Render the back two figs to the main window. Savepz3 and save tiff. Import tiff to main window (File>import background picture). Showw all figures...Hide 4... Otherwise you need a bigger pc and few can do more than 6 figures.

512 will not do unless you do 2 figures at the time? I've got 512Mb and WinXP too, and I'm working on a scene with 10 Don's and Judy's (all with dynamic hair) and a complete city in it without any problems. Just make sure you've as less as possible running in the background and no other applications are open. But upgrading to more mem never is a bad thing, but cannot be the cause of your problem with 6 figures only. After all the reqs for P5 are these: 500MHz Pentium class or compatible (700Mhz or greater recommended), 128MB system RAM (256MB recommended), 24-bit color display, 1024 x 768 resolution 500MB free hard disk space and you're way above that. How about your Harddisk, does it have lot's of free size still?

I dunno how your virtual Mem is set. Prob on Auto, what I would do is fix that. I do have 512mb DDR ram, and 80gigbyte hd to help. 1.) Go into your control Panel. 2.) Select Performance and maintenance. 3.) Select System 4.) Select advance Tab 5.) Select Performance setting and press on the Settings Tab 6.) Then advanced Tab in the Settings. 7.) You will then see "Virtual Memory". Press on the "Change" 8.) Now you will see your Virtual Memory" size. Your "Initial Size", is suppose to be 1.5x of your memory. For example: 512 x 1.5 = 768 Your "Maximum Size", is suppose to be 3x of your memory. For example: 512 x 3 = 1536 That will put the virtual memory on your hard drive, for Min and Max. The bigger the hard drive space, the better the virtual memory is stored and used. That is another process.

I've gotten this message (when I've been on the web for a long time and downloaded some large files), but I can clear it by re-booting. When I get the message, it says that XP is increasing my virtual memory and that some requests might not be filled while XP is busy doing this. So it sounds to me like XP adjusts it automatically itself.

Virtual memory is much slower than real RAM, so upgrade your RAM if you can. aeilkema: I wouldn't like to use P5 on 128M, I must say... Virtual memory works best if it can run on a separate disk, with nothing else on there; failing that, you can make a new partition just to hold the paging file. If you set the minimum and maximum sizes the same, it will allocate a fixed amount of disk space and avoid fragmentation. Unless you're really tight on disk space, you can afford to set a high value (say 3 times your physical RAM), and then you won't get those Windows messages. And if you are that tight on disk space, there's going to be trouble sooner or later - time to upgrade again...

A little more concrete info; 'Virtual memory' is referring to the swap file that Windows sets up. Many processes must run in the actual physical ram. Many others are just as happy sitting in what they -think- is physical ram and being accessed only when they are needed. Virtual memory is also used to store large files that are not active, but need to be accessed directly (large Poser textures, for example). Robo's rules are what MS recommends, not neccesarily what is best for your purposes. The 1.5-3 rule for the swap file is acceptable in general computing, but in dealing with graphic apps, the rules change a bit, as you can be dealing with individual files that can consume 100 megs or more...and be dealing with several of them at the same time. Using XP adds to the need for a large swap file, as it is an utter pig on memory. If you have the drive space, a good set of numbers is 1 gig min and 3 gig max; this gives you room enough, and also is a large enough swapfile that Windows won't interrupt a process with the 'low virtual memory' message...which can mess up whatever was going on...

So many myths about virtual memory... First of all, it doesn't matter if you have 256MB or 3GB physical RAM - Windows will assign a max 2GB address space to any process, fixed. Of course, if you run a process requiring 2GB RAM on a computer with only 256MB physical RAM, things will become incredibly slow. Then, what's with all the page file size tweaking? I never had any problems with the default settings and never had to mess with them, ever. I have been compiling Poser 5 on a computer with 320MB RAM, and be assured that the whole thing takes up a lot more memory when you're not only rendering lots of dynamic hair but also have Visual Studio with the whole source code running in the background... curtskinn, in your case, that means: The message you're getting, is just a notification that Windows itself has been increasing the swap file size. And you know what - just ignore it. It's not an error message, everything's fine. I don't know why Windows is explicitly telling us about it, OS X does exactly the same without all the fuzz. Don't start messing with any system setttings, the defaults are good enough for all of us. Will additional physical RAM help? You bet! It won't necessarily increase the max figures you can render, but you will see a nice speed increase.

Attached Link: http://www.curiouslabs.com/article/archive/233/#anc826

My comments apply to Poser 4, where from personal experience the defaults are not good enough (and Curious Labs agree with me - see link, near the bottom of the list where it says 'Poser 4 can't render high resolution images. Error appears "Insufficient disk space to render".'). If Poser 5 no longer requires that sort of messing about, I shall be exceedingly glad. :) But the performance of virtual memory can still be improved over the default Windows settings, with benefits for all users.

That is with regard to the error message that Poser 4 gives - from what I understood, curtskinn got a message from Windows, you know, one of these speech bubbles from the system tray that 2k and XP nag you with.

To put it simply, 512MB of RAM is not a lot if you're going to be really ambitious in your Poser work. You need more memory.