One other big thing to note: Poser 6 has a know memory bug, which causes it to give the "out of memory" message even on a high end system with lots of RAM. There is supposed to be a service release soon to fix this. To answer your main question: To put it simply: file fragmentation can occur "naturally" on any system any time you read and write data from a hard drive; the more often you do so, the more likely it is to occur. Poser pushes around a heck of a lot of data when it reads and writes a figure; if it (or any other app) crashes out, it drastically increases the likelyhood of file fragmentation; this will happen on any drive or partition that Windows is working with; putting Poser 6 on it's own partition is not likely to change this, it will most likely just keep most of the fragmentation local. As far as partitions go: You can only change the partition setting by being logged in as an administrator and using the disk manager tool. I would really not recommend messing with the partitions or the swap file unless you really know what you are doing. I'm assuming that you have a name brand PC with the PC maker's restore information on the drive. Changing the partition settings requires reformatting part or all of your HDD and this often will mess up the restore partition or the restore program (affecting your ability to return the system to it's "new" condition). As the previous posters have stated, this is really not a very good setup to use with something like Poser; the best thing you can do for it is to increase the system memory; Windows XP itself hogs almost 200 MB of system memory just to run the operating system, and given that you have an integrated video card with shared memory, this doesn't leave much memory for anything else let alone Poser. The lack of memory causes Windows to hammer the hard drive even more by using the swapfile - again, increasing your rate of fragmentation. Adjusting the size of the swapfile will not make a difference; performace will always take a hit as the system is using the much slower HDD then the much faster RAM. I would recommend upgrading the memory to at least 512 MB, more if possible. The other worthwhile upgrade would be to use a dedicated 3D video card (ATI or Nvidia); even the cheapest dedicated video card will usually outperform an integrated graphics chipset, and won't rob system RAM. Poser 6 has OpenGL support that will give it a boost when running on an OpenGL compliant video card. Finally, if it is possible in your system, I would look at upgrading the processor & motherboard to a Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon. Of course, after all this, it might just be better off to get a new computer for Poser... Hope that helps at all.