I'm having problems with P5 locking up during renders that I have not had before. My system has a 1.5 mhz Athlon with 1 gig RAM and a XFX Geforce FX5200 video card. I kept getting messages that I didn't have enough virtual memory and I don't know if I screwed something up. Should I let Windows XP set the cache or should I set it? I have 2 hard drives, the one with P5 is partitioned. The scene that I am currently working on has 2 V3 and one M2 characters, but I have rendered many scenes with that or more before without problems. Any suggestions appreciated. Does P6 handle memory any better or would my problems increase?

Hmmm....I've been fighting that same fight for quite some time now. I will be ordering another 512RAM chip this week hoping that the upgrade to a gig will help but, I just don't know. I'll keep an eye on this thread and see what the Guru's say. Good luck.

I prefer to set the page file size myself. Windows can expand the page file as needed, but Poser tends to be a little impatient and crash before the expansion is complete. I'd suggest setting the page file size to 2 GB min and max on both of your drives, results in faster Windows operation than setting a single 4 GB page file. In my experience P6 is somewhat better. If a render crashes due to lack of memory (virtual or otherwise), there's a good chance you can recover and don't have to kill Poser using Task Manager.

Is that 4 GB based on drive sizes or is that just your suggested standard? Does it matter that I may not have 2 GB of space on one drive?

Those 2 GB per drive recommendations are based on your RAM size. And the fact that you don't have 2 GB free on one drive may very well account for your virtual memory problems - especially if it's your system drive. I highly recommend freeing up some space on that drive, it's probably formatted as NTFS, and NTFS performance goes down quickly if you have less than 1/3 of your drive as free space.

Hmmm...I'm not sure how to adjust page file sizes. My Compaq Laptop (WinXP, Athalon processor) keeps me confused most of the time already. I don't have ports for more than one more RAM chip, and the manufacturer says it won't handle more that 1GB of RAM anyway...alas...as Dumbledor says, "Earwax!"

Adjusting page file sizes: - right-click the My Computer icon (either on your desktop or in Explorer) - choose Properties - choose the Advanced tab - click the Settings button in the Performance frame - choose the Advanced tab in the new dialog - click the Change button - choose Custom size - select the drive on which you want to change the page file settings - set minimum and maximum values to the desired amount and press the Set button - repeat for any other drive. Windows will just show drive letters, not whether a partition is on a particular physical drive. You can get some performance gain by spreading the page file over different physical drives, so you'll have to know what drive letter (=partition) resides on what physical drive. In the case of laptops it's easy - they only have one physical drive, so it's useless to split up the pagefile over several drive letters.

Thanks, svdl! Not only are you an absolute wizard at dynamic clothing, you'r one heck of a mentor on technical stuff. I did the changes in less than two minutes (big 'ol scaredy cat me...) and we'll just see...10000 seemed like a nice number to set it at...

10000 MB is a bit much - that's 10 GB! Most applications cannot use more than 2 GB. I recommend setting the total virtual memory size at more than 2 GB, so that you can run several memory-hungry processes (including WinXP itself) at the same time, but 10 GB is overkill. It's a good idea to specify a multiple of 8 MB - that's the usual size of one "cylinder" on a physical disk. Using only whole cylinders for the swap file gives a tiny performance increase.

Oh Crikey!! Well, now everyone knows why I teach English and not Math...I'll go change that immediately...all those zeroes....almost like looking at the back row of my 0800 Freshman Composition 1 class....Thanks for catching that and telling me!

Ok, I set my swap files to 2000 MB each on my C & F drives. C/ is the main drive where Windows resides and F/ is where my P5 is stored. That's a total of 4 GB swap file, but my render still locks up half way through. Would it help if I made it 4 GB on each drive? This is frustrating!

Increasing the swapfile beyond a total of 4 GB won't help. Poser 5 creates temporary files, and if you have to kill Poser due to a locked up render, those temp files are not removed. And they have a tendency to mess up subsequent renders. So I'd suggest running the following commands from the command prompt (when Poser is not running): del f:poserTemp*.* /s del f:*.tmp /s and you'll have a decent chance that the scene will render. There's another possibility. Sometimes an .OBJ file is constructed in such a way that Poser gets confused over the materials. There's a little utility called S.T.O.M.P. that can fix the .OBJ files for you. Don't know the link off the top of my head, but it's made by Spanki and you can probably find it by searching the Poser and Poser Technical forums.