it might be the SR of poser as well. i know i dont have the latest patch, i think i have SR2 or 3 or something. i installed P5 fresh on this machine and it wouldnt run. i took it from my old drive and just copied the whole thing over, and that version runs fine. i dont get it, doesnt make much sense... but im happy i dont have to run it in safe mode or disable DEP. im far from a computer expert, but i would imagine that with dual channel DDR - especially on an athlon 64 system with the on-die memory controller and technology like hypertransport running at 2ghz it would be more advantageous for it to use your physical ram than virtual mem. otherwise whats the point of investing in 4 gigs? might as well just get 1 gig and be done with it. newer SATA 150 drives with 8 megs cache are fast - and 10k rpm wd raptors even faster, but theyre still a huge system bottleneck. its not just windows - PS is pretty dumb too. ive seen it use only 300 or so megs of RAM and 4 gigs of virtual mem :( some apps are a little brighter - like higher end 3D apps allow you to assign how much memory they use and they actually use it. i have coolmon running all the time, so i can easily monitor my ram/pagefile usage, what processes are using it, as well as my fan speeds and system temps on my second monitor. im still pretty disappointed with RAM use in winXP, although its light years better than win9x :) there are tonnes of articles on optimum page file settings and maintenance, as well as little XP tweaks for those with insane amounts of RAM - definitely spend an hour googling them and reading up, might make a difference.