Hi folks. Im thinking on update my OS. And Im confused. My W2K system works well, but a little slow with Poser6 (VERY slow with FireFly), and Ive heared that XP uses RAM better than W2K. But... my computer isnt a very recent one (two years old) and my fear is to do a change with an OS bigger, slower and getting worse than now. So tell me what you think; this is my profile 1800 Mhz Processor 768 Mb RAM DDR 222 HD 80 Gb 50/50 used (37.1 Gb used, 37.3 Gb free) 32 mb video card (OpenGL not supported) The question is: need I to update my sytem with XP or better I wait to my next computer update? (I want to update soon my RAM to its maximum level, 1 Gb; and my video card too)

FireFly is slow (period->). I have a dual 2.66GHz Xeon with 4GB and 7200RPM drives - it is still slow. Since Poser is not HT or multiprocessor aware, best to up your processor and memory to the most that you can afford. 2GB max for memory. Maybe a 2.4-3.2 GHz PIV? XP has some better architecture, but the hardware will be more beneficial.

Don't change, older the Windows, better. I'm still using Windows 95 for Poser4/5!

Only tests I've seen, quite a long time ago, had Win2K slightly faster than XP, possably due to less overhead. I use Win2K, I've got no plans to change until I find something that will not run in it. I refuse to play Bill's O.S. of the year game. ;-)

What kawecki said is true, the newer versions of windows might have some improvements but each new version is a little slower than the last.

As long as you can get drivers for the video card upgrading should be no problem - your system is slightly better than mine (1700XP Athlon, plain old PC133 RAM) but the kernel of 2000 and XP is very similar - it's Windows 9x that has hopeless memory management (when I switched from 98SE to XP I saw a 20% speed increase on Jim's benchmark scene)

DON'T!

No reason to upgrade from 2000 to XP, unless you can't get Win2000 drivers for your hardware. You've got a decent CPU, P6 would benefit from a faster graphics card (only preview, not rendering), more RAM and a faster harddisk. XP is slightly slower than 2000, if you turn of all the visual gadgets (which means it'll look and behave like 2000) the speed is exactly the same as 2000. Not surprising, the kernels are very similar.

Win 2k works fine for me (btw..I found something that doesn't run on Win 2k..Vue 2..;) It's pretty stable..so unless MS stops supporting it, I'd stay with what ya know..

Go for it! I was a die hard 98SE fan for years... finally got Windows 2000 on my desk top last year in the spring... huge difference. I have XP on my laptop and have been using it almost exclusively. I now prefer it to Windows 2000. I have it set to look like onld windows just because I don't like the cartoony appearance of default XP Home, but I find it much faster and more stable than 2000.

One thing no one's asked yet. Are you using NTFS? Because if you're still using FAT, it's the worst thing you could do. I don't plan to change from win 2k until I'm absolutely forced to. It's rock solid and that's all I want. I'm quite prepared to believe that XP is a great system too. After all, it's a rehashed version on win 2k, but I wouldn't dump 2k to go to XP. Not much gain there at all. BTW, you can can get a video card really cheap that will give you OpenGL support. That would definitely help with P6. mac

I have in another computer dual boot Win95 and Win98, but the performance of Win98 is worst than 95. In this present moment I have a client's computer with XP that I'm trying to make something reliable, what a s**t! I have decided to never use XP for my use, in case that I need some new hardware resources that aren't supported by old OS, I shall use Linux. You can find any application that you need for Linux, including Maya, and in worst case you can use Windows emulators. For applications such as Poser that use 95% of CPU and the remaining 5% depending on Windows, a Windows emulator for Linux will not have any practical degradation in performance.

Windows xp is quite slow on my computer.

If you've got less than 256 MB RAM, WinXP will be slow. If you've got less than 128 MB RAM, Win2000 will be slow. About Linux: I once tried Suse 7.1 on an old Compaq Deskpro(Pentium I 166 Mhz, 48 MB RAM, 3 GB disk, S3TrioV2 PCI graphics card). Never again. I never had an OS that was THAT slow. And it couldn't work with the S3Trio graphics chip, which was one of the standard controllers back then. WinNT 4.0 Server (domain controller + SQL server + IIS + file/print server + Exchange server) ran much faster on that rig. Not getting a WinNT based OS stable on a machine only happened once to me (and I've installed literally hundreds of machines). A rather exotic combination of a Cyrix CPU and some unknown chipset manufacturer on an extremely cheap machine wouldn't work with NT4 (we're talking 1999). Had to revert to Win98 - with all the inherent stability issues of that (rather lousy) OS. By the way, if you want to have a fast running XP, turn off all the visual goodies and make sure you have at least 256 MB of RAM. Norton AV and McAfee AV are also (in)famous for slowing down machines, I prefer AVG or PC-Cillin.

Some old video cards don't work well with Linux, the fabricants never released the Linux drivers and the hackers didn't wasted too much time writing Linux drivers for them. Today most of the good video cards have drivers for Linux and OpenGL, as Nvidia. When you buy a video card look if has drivers for Linux and OpenGl, if have not then don't buy, buy another one instead.

There is not much fundamental difference between Win2k and WinXP - they share the same core. MS just announced that they are not supporting 2k anymore, if that makes any difference. Going to a newer OS should help a bit because of better memory management, but they only thing that is going really speed FF up is a newer processor or more memory.

Thanks, folks, I think I have a good general view with your posts. Ill buy a video card and... bye bye XP ;)

A new video card isn't going to improve your render speeds. This may only make the Document window smoother. The two pieces that affect rendering the most are the cpu and memory.

Oh, it improve my renders, Im sure. Usually I lose the most of time on posing the figures. Or I pose them without textures and props, or each movement is slow slow slow slow... I need to see what Im posing