In my experience most applications will not use 100% unless they really need it. When rendering Poser will probably shoot up to 100% on your system as it does on mind. But generally an application does not need the whole 100% For example, right now I ahve Firebird open, I'm writing something in Microsoft Word, ICQ is running and so is iTunes which is merrily blasting out some music, my CPU is only at an average of 7%. CPU usage is a funny thing, your CPU pushes through an enourmous amount of instructions, but most of those instructions are completed in nanoseconds and won't register too well. That's why when your machines does shoot to 100% for a period of time, you generally notice every really begins to grate. Not sure if this helps, but there you go. Best wishes Jody