I noticed some people having some problems with P6 and XP, such as pointers disappearing. There's been quite a few comments regarding drivers and cards, but there are also some changes you change make inside XP. At the minimum, they may improve performance; at best they could improve reliability. 1) Right click on "My computer", and choose "Properties" 2) There are several tabs at the top. Choose "Advanced" 3) In the top section, you'll see "Performance. Visual Effects, ...". Press the top "Settings" button. 4) You're presented several radio buttons. Choose "Adjust for best performance." 5) Press "OK" and "OK" This disables most visual effects in Windows XP. A freebie from Microsoft called TweakUI, will disable some more under the "general" tab. It's part of the "Power Toys for XP" By the way, Nvidia has it's own control panel for some cards. It controls menu transparancy, among other things. Worth taking a look. Though it's not strictly related to video, if you're using the "Classic" Win98 interface on XP, disable the "Themes" service. You might consider disabling the "Indexing" services also, as it's quite a memory hog, and in my opinion not needed. Cheers

As you've suggested, it really pays to find out more about these matters. There are an almost infinite number of XP tweaks that will improve perfomance, e.g., disabling the paging executive, enabling udma-66, tweaking irq handling, increasing the primary app priority, tweaking the usb polling interval, cleaning and defragging the registry, defragging the boot, increasing the IO page lock limit, optimizing the prefetch, tweaking the file allocation size, disabling the messenger, and as you mentioned, themes, the indexing services, and perhaps a few other services many users don't need or use. And Microsoft has nearly all this stuff set up 'out of the box' to degrade performance in exchange for 'features.' Ugh. Anyway, there are various utilities, some of them free, that will improve XP performance quite significantly, and very well worth looking into, IMHO.

Attached Link: http://www.tweakxp.com/default.aspx

Attached Link: http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/2361/Windows_Tip_Eliminate_XP_Annoyances.html

This one especially: Windows 2000 or XP doesn't let you add or remove all the programs it installs by default. Multimedia applications, the XP messenger, games, accessories, and accessibility options do not show up in the Add/Remove Programs dialog box. What if you want to get rid of them? Here's how to make Windows treat these applications just like it treats all the others. 1)Unhide all files 2)Search for sysoc.inf. Open it in notepad. 3)Look for the "Old Base Components" section in Windows 2000, and "Components" in XP. It will look approximately like this (depending on your version): ; old base components Games=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,games.inf,HIDE,7 AccessUtil=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,accessor.inf,HIDE,7 CommApps=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,communic.inf,HIDE,7 media_clips=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,mmopt.inf,HIDE,7 MultiM=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,multimed.inf,HIDE,7 AccessOpt=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,optional.inf,HIDE,7 Pinball=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,pinball.inf,HIDE,7 MSWordPad=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,wordpad.inf,HIDE,7 The word "HIDE" in an entry hides that application from your Add/Remove Programs dialog box. To add games to the Add/Remove menu, delete the word HIDE from its entry (but leave the commas that surround it). You also have to remove "HIDE" from "AccessUtil=" for this tip to work. To unhide games, for example, my new "Old Base Components" Windows 2000 entry will look like the following: ; old base components Games=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,games.inf,,7 AccessUtil=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,accessor.inf,,7 CommApps=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,communic.inf,HIDE,7 media_clips=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,mmopt.inf,HIDE,7 MultiM=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,multimed.inf,HIDE,7 AccessOpt=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,optional.inf,HIDE,7 Pinball=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,pinball.inf,HIDE,7 MSWordPad=ocgen.dll,OcEntry,wordpad.inf,HIDE,7 4)Save the file. Check for the new entries in the Add/Remove Programs dialog box after you restart your computer.

good stuff. too bad we can't get all pc renderers and modelers to sign a petition to microsoft demanding all future versions of windows include a 'Maximum Raw Performance' button. ;*) unfortunately, not only hardware, but basic needs even among 'power posers' will vary ...

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what about virtual memory? I have read several times where people say "try increasing the amount of virtual memory" given to Poser? I have yet to figure out how to do this in XP. This is a great thread and i hope an answer to that question can be posted by someone friendly also.

XP is better at running Poser than Win98 was, but you do seem to need more RAM. I shall be trying some of thses tweaks. Incidentally, would switching to the NTFS improve things? Trouble is, I have software which still expects to be running on a FAT32 partition

god yes! NTFS is a big jump in speed. I certainly noticed it in most of my apps. My backup drive is still FAT32 and i had it in a few weeks ago. Also, never underestimate a fast harddrive RPM and disk cache either. RAM i'm not so sure about, i went from 2 gigs to 4 gigs and Poser didn't seem to care at all. Pretty bummed about that.

So how can you check and make sure you're on NTFS and not FAT32 in WinXP? David

open My Computer, right click on each Local disk and choose Properties. Look for "File System NTFS" or "File System FAT32"

NTFS or FAT32? Open My Computer and check the General Tab of the drive properties. RAM -- I know earlier versions of Windows had a limit on how much RAM they could allocate to a program, and 2GB sounds familiar.

I am not sure any app can even use 2GB of RAM effectively. Also, keep in mind, if you are running WinXP, a large amount of RAM gets allocated to the OS on boot. As far as allocating your virtual memory to Poser, you cannot manually tell the virtual memory where to point to. You could manually increase the amount, but this is not advisable. Windows actually does a good job of memory allocation to virtual memory, it's one of Win's good features. Poser is slow people. It does a lot of disk I/O. One day maybe I will sit and test just how much occurs during a good render. My assumption is a lot. Increasing RAM in this situation is not going to help much. I really wish EF would consider selling special versions of the product so that we users with multiple computers can use the power of our networks to make render farms. That would help greatly.

No doubt, i use Poser 5 and Poser 6 currently in a networking environment, bummer that Poser 6 can't be duplicated like Max!

Attached Link: http://www.sysinternals.com/ProcessesAndThreadsUtilities.html

i do believe 2 gig is the XP or 32-bit limit per application as for having more ram than that, anyone tried setting up a ram disk? i haven't done this in several years, but it used to be that the performance of applications that were disk i/o intensive (defiitely think Poser qualifies) benefited plenty from that kind of set up

It depends on what you use your machine for. My primary box does more for me than just 3D (I have render boxes to do the grunt work) and this machine does email, general business use and 3D. Turn off indexing? Hell no, I like being able to find my files fast :) Turn off virtual memory? Hell no. Right now I have some 200meg paged out on it from running but mostly dormant programs... I don't want to have to shut those down. The visual effevts stuff is ok to turn off, but I liek it. It soothes my eyes and I am not at all above wanting the thing I look at 20 hours a day to be easy on my eyes. It doesn't slow me down any - but then I have a pretty fast machine and a good video card. I woudl suggest anyone tweaking take it slow, and make sure you try one thing at a time. it's pretty easy to hose up a box.

The indexing service rarely makes searches faster, but slows down your PC every time a file that's being indexed is changed. Unless you're spending 90% of your time searching, and rarely adding / deleting / modifying files, I think it's not worth it. It also sucks up RAM that could be better used. I've got a set of "old eyes" also, and I hate pointless effects on my computer. I believe it reduces productivity as you have to wait a second every time you click on pretty much anything in XP. Still some people like XP's interface; others call it "candy-apple" / "tinker-toy." Gimme the classic Windows98 look anyday.

I use the classic interface also,with few bells and whistles enabled. Another simple thing that is easy to forget is clearing your clipboard. Many times I've copied huge files /directories to my clipboard to paste elsewhere and forgot that it's still there. Typically I'll just copy something small(Like a single letter or number) to replace the huge file(s). What I'd like to know is,if I've moved a file out of a directory,why is it that XP doesn't let me delete the now empy folder until after I reboot? Does this happen to anyone else? Tom

What I'd like to know is,if I've moved a file out of a directory,why is it that XP doesn't let me delete the now empy folder until after I reboot? That isn't XP doing that opften it's a userspace program. Soemthing didn;t clear a handle to the folder, and XP is preventing you from nuking an in use folder. There are tools to forcibly clear those.

Regarding can't delete an empty folder till delete. I assume you have not disabled the indexing service. THis should work from Windows 95 to XP. Sometimes Windows Explorer or the Indexing service get confused. 1) Press the "Windows Key", near bottom left of keyboard, and the "R" keys together 2) Type "CMD" or "Command" (one or the other will work) net stop "indexing service" exit (don't worry it's temporary, and we'll restart it later) 3) Press the "Windows key" plus "E". You should have two "panes". On the left is the "folder pane". Click (left-click) on the hard drive (not any folder). 4) Use View...Refresh or the "F5" key to force a refresh. 5) Click (left-click) on the folder you want to delete 6) Use + keys together. This will delete the folder instead of moving it to the recycle bin. 7) Press the "Windows Key", near bottom left of keyboard, and the "R" keys together 8) Type "CMD" or "Command" (one or the other will work) net start "indexing service" exit

Strange..It doesn't always do it,and I cant nail down what conditions make it happen and what don't make it happen. Can you point me to one of those tools? It drives me nuts because I never remember to go back and delete them after reboot so I have all of these stray empty foldes everywhere. Thanks Tom

Number 6 should have read Use "Shift" + "Delete" keys together. I accidently put Less-Than-Sign and Greater-Than-Sign, which I guess got confused with HTML.

XPoseted with you kenyarb. I've have indexing service shut off on both drives via Right click drive > Properties > uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast searching" BTW I'm on XP Pro if that makes any difference. Thanks,...I'll try your approch next time it happens. Tom

Can something like this be done for Windows 2000?

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" Windows 2000 or XP doesn't let you add or remove all the programs it installs by default."

If you want a total control of your computer, just boot it from the old DOS and XTREEGOLD for DOS is an excellent tool.
You will find things that never believed to exist in your computer and you can kill anything you want.
If you don't like DOS, just boot the computer from Linux and run Midnight Commander.

I see that there are 2 separate queries going on in this thread.

I'm interested in the original posters post regarding improving performance in Windows XP. Only now I'm on Windows 2000 and want to know if there is something equivalent I can do in Windows 2000

Actually.... no. I think I dug up the wrong thread!

What I am seeking is the method to make sure that the memory usage numbers (or something like that) are the same in some archive area or something.

I'll have to go and try searching more.  It was a thread from last year that helped with rendering.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2516735

This is a good source of info. As well as this place too. I did a lot of tweaking on XP using the power tools for XP. It really helped a lot!

Thanks for the tip! And while I was looking through some of this stuff making adjustments I finally found my missing recycle bin. Been missing from my desktop for a couple of months and no matter what I did I could not find it, even with a search. Found out it had somehow come unchecked. Knew it had several gigs of files taking up space. I also found out that each of my drives has a recycle bin loaded with stuff to throw out and gain even more space. So along with disk cleanup, dumping the bins and compressing the files on each drive I've gained over 10g of space back.

Now to invest in a DVD burner to remove all of the zips stored on the drives and pick up even more space. Thanks again!

hehe, so I didn't bump this up in vain after all?

Wow!  10 gigs of trash... that's a lot of trash,  LOL

Quote - This one especially: Windows 2000 or XP doesn't let you add or remove all the programs it installs by default. Multimedia applications, the XP messenger, games, accessories, and accessibility options do not show up in the Add/Remove Programs dialog box. What if you want to get rid of them?

On the left of the Add/Remove Programs box, there's a button called "Add/Remove Windows Components", you can use that to remove Messenger, games, Windows Media Player, IE, Outlook, and a fair number of other Windows default install programs, so there is a way to get rid of them without doing anything too complex.

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I'm interested in the original posters post regarding improving performance in Windows XP. Only now I'm on Windows 2000 and want to know if there is something equivalent I can do in Windows 2000.

Most of the tweeks for XP aren't needed for Win2k. The only tweek that will likely be super helpful is the game tweek to enable compatability mode:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=279792
Aside from that, try to have 2gb RAM (any more than that is a waste, and in reality, anything more than 1gb doesn't really do much), I WOULD SUGGEST defragging your swap drive, then making your swap file minimum size equal to the suggested swap file size, with the max 1.5 times minimum.

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then making your swap file minimum size equal to the suggested swap file size, with the max 1.5 times minimum.

You're referring to virtual memory, right?

If so, when I looked both were set to 256.  When I changed the Min = 2  and Max = anything above 256,  upon rebooting I got a "Your system is low  on virtual memory, Windows is allocating more memory and some process may not be available for use" error.  And when I looked some other "available" something or other would say 11 MB or 12 MB.

When I changed both min and max back to 256 and rebooted, there was no low virtual memory error and when I looked in the window where the changes were made, that 11 or 12 MB was now saying 256 MB again.

This is on Windows 2000 Pro.

When I had my laptop which had XP and 512 MB DDR Ram, I managed to change those numbers to Min=2  Max=4095  without problem.  But for some reason I can't change the settings on my desktop.

Oh, and how do you defrag a swap drive?  When I go to my defrag all I see are hard drive C and hard drive D (older one for storage)

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This link is in relation to accessing more than 2GB ram running WinXP Home and Pro.  The discussion is about PSCS2.. however I have also read other discussions on it's usefulness and relevance to other apps as well. 

I've not had time to mess with it yet.. but would assume for someone with more than 2GB ram instaled then something like this tweak would possibly be of benefit?

http://www.nikonians.org/dcforum/DCForumID11/15088.html

I was once told by a tech at Poser that if you have a big render job you can restart in "diagnostic startup" mode and it will free a lot of memory and improve render speed.   Run>msconfig>check "diagnostic startup" and restart, run Poser and render your file.  It has helped me in a few instances.  Supposedly, it does a minimal load and could be a simpler way to unload all the things previously discussed. 

If  Poser is able to render in diagnostic mode it means that the remaing features of XP in normal mode have no use at all!

I applied the above tweak earlier in respect to adding the switch in at boot to access the higher amount of ram. 

Poser didnt run any faster BUT it did allow me to finish a render which I'd previously tried a half dozen times or so  with numerous render settings (and failed) including minimal bucket and texture sizes.  i did still have to lower the bucket and texture sizes but not to the same extent, and to my relief this time I didnt get an out of memory error.

I've also dual cpu and have set Poser to run from CPU 1 rather than spreading the load across both that way if I am also in PS doing something or Bryce or Daz Studio I can set those to run from CPU 0 and not suffer any noticable performance degradation in those apps.

An important point to remember about virtual memory (swap file space) is that if you let Windows manage it, the file size is dynamic. This means that Windows will grow and shrink the file as necessary and as the demands of the apps running and the OS change.

This leads to two problems. Firstly, the swap file can become fragmented (non-contiguous set of clusters allocated to the file), thereby slowing access to it. Imagine that Windows sets a dynamic swap file space of 1Gb based on usage requirements. Later your usage patterns change a bit and Windows decides to reduce it to say 750Mb (this can happen more often than you think). This leaves a chunk of 250Mb available to the file system. You then happen to install a large app or game, move some files around, extract some new archives, or whatever. These changes may then cause the 250Mb free space chunk to be used up. Then lets say you start up Poser/Bryce/3DS/Whatever and start a nice big project. Windows now realises that you do not have enough swap space any more so it increases the size to 1Gb again, or perhaps even more. Now there is a problem because the 250Mb of free space that follows on from the 750Mb of space the swap file occupies, is used up, so Windows allocates another 250Mb of space elsewhere on the drive to increase the swap file size. Instant swap file fragmentation! Now imagine this happening once a day for a month. Your swap file can end up split into many chunks.

Secondly, working with a file that changes in size is slower than working with a fixed file size and just populating the file with data or clearing parts of the file after use. If you manually set both the minimum and maximum swap file sizes to the same value this will created a static swap file of that size. This value should be the Recommended Size that Windows displays at the bottom of the window in My Computer/Properties/Advanced/Performance/Advanced/Virtual Memory.

There is a lot of supporting information on the 'net regarding these changes and their impact on performance. I would suggest reading up on the subject more before following anyone's advice.

As per usual, just my 2c.

I used the tip at the top of this thread and..YIKES! Maybe it's the Acer laptop, I'm not sure, but things went to heck in a handbasket quickly and I"m still trying to get everything back to what passed for normal.

I appreciate all the tech info, and I'm bookmarking this thread, so I can keep up with the discussion but doing these things scare me, I must admit.

Dont go making a whole heap of hasty tweaks at once if you arent well acquainted with what you are changing. Make a couple of changes at a time and even take notes if necessary as to how/what you changed.  Once you are satisfied the change isnt a problem to you.. move onto the next item.  In doing this if something goes pear shaped you will be able to easily and quickly back trace your steps and change something back to a more suitable setting for your PC.

Whilst taking notes is a little tedious.. I've found in the past on occasions it has been a blessing to and saved me a lot of time and frustration.  Its also been a good way to learn about my computer and OS

If you're using Windows XP, before you do any changes mentioned in this thread, first go to your start menu and look for something called "System Restore" (probably under the Accessories -> System Tools menu). This will pop open a window asking if you want to restore your system, or create a restore point. Choose to create a restore point.

Then make your system changes. If you don't like them, go back and run System Restore. This time, choose to restore your system. You'll be presented with a calendar listing all of the dates upon which system restore points were created. Choose the day upon which you created the above system restore point. Your system will be restored to the way it was before the changes were made.

The System Restore is another big headache, if you do something that Windows didn't liked, Windows will restore all destroying one or more hour of your work of personal configuration.
The only way the stop Windows destroying your work is to delete all the system restore folder, but this folder is hidden, not shown in Windows and Windows do not allow any access to it.
The only way for deleting this folder is booting your computer with DOS or Linux.
Of course once you have deleted the restore data folder is no way back, if you did something wrong maybe you'll need to install Windows again.

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then making your swap file minimum size equal to the suggested swap file size, with the max 1.5 times minimum.

You're referring to virtual memory, right?

If so, when I looked both were set to 256.  When I changed the Min = 2  and Max = anything above 256,  upon rebooting I got a "Your system is low  on virtual memory, Windows is allocating more memory and some process may not be available for use" error.  And when I looked some other "available" something or other would say 11 MB or 12 MB.

 oops. i meant to say set minimum size equal to the suggested  MAX swap file size. my bad.

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Oh, and how do you defrag a swap drive?  When I go to my defrag all I see are hard drive C and hard drive D (older one for storage)

Not clear enough; defrag the drive the swap file is going to be created on prior to changing the swap settigs.

Quote - Poser didnt run any faster BUT it did allow me to finish a render which I'd previously tried a half dozen times or so with numerous render settings (and failed) including minimal bucket and texture sizes. i did still have to lower the bucket and texture sizes but not to the same extent, and to my relief this time I didnt get an out of memory error.

It's my understanding that texture resizing within Poser can use more RAM than it saves. It's enough of a concern that the Poser 7 adverts mention they've fixed it. So it may help to do a resized texture. Backup the fullsize and save the shrunk version under the original name; then you don't have to worry about missing references in Poser. I also gather that Power converts the texture to an uncompressed format for internal use. So the size of the file doesn't matter much.