I have upgraded to a 2.5Ghz Celeron CPU, 1Gb RAM, and a couple hundred gigs of hard drive. My computer just gets utterly sluggish when I try to work with say six or eight Millennium 2 .cr2. Should it be this way with my hardware? I am running Poser 6.

Well, theres a helluva lot of polygons in six to eight millenium figures so I reckon your PC is going to complain a bit! Then you add a couple of halfway decent textures and maybe some hair and your going to be crawling! Try just using a high polygon 'Mil' figure as your main character and maybe try some of the 'low res' figures available to fill out your scene.Try checking out some of the tutorials here on setting up 'multi figure' scenes. Hope this helps a bit.

2nd on butter, Yikes! 6-8? I would guess,, yes! Very normal. 150+megs each x 8 and you're getting close to your Ram. You can hide a few at a time. Should speed things up. Use low res textures. You really cannot see a 4000x texture with an 8 figure scene, anyway. Make sure you are on Scree3D, too. Avoid any full preview with this much weight too. Use Doc style.

LowRes texture. Simple so why did I not think of it. I also choke on Miki and V3 but this scene was V3, Don, P4, P4 and respective clothes. I try to use those pre-clothed figures when I can and pose in line preview, then cartoon, then smooth/shaded. But thank you for the reality check.

another trick for large crowds is to put the 'quality' figures up front, and go down in complexity of figures as you fade into the distance (say using Dork and Posette at 50 yards, etc)

Just a general rule of thumb: any computer you buy is obsolete soon after you buy it, since the computer makers are engaged in a constant war to get you to buy a new one. But to be fair, the current crop of computers is more than adequate for well-written apps. It's just poorly-written stuff like Poser 5 and 6 that make our computers seem inadequate.

no I think it's the 6-8 milli vigures, clothes, hair, texture, lights and render settings that will slow any computer down

I have in the shop some morphing P4 Nude figures that take standard clothes with scaling, and then I try to use the P4 Casual Man -the casual woman looks a bit dorky. But I was hoping to get an idea of whether my sluggishness was to be expected. Then someone sent me an IM about my anti-virus software and I realized that I had gotten new anti-virus software right when I got my Poser 6. I had suspected it was a virus but maybe it is the anti-virus as my scans kept showing up clean and my ISP is supposed to have a virus filter at the server. As for poorly written stuff, Poser is bad, but is it worse then any and everything from Microsoft? I used to be so Happy on my Mac with a 1Mb OS and a full service applications like WriteNow, ColorIt! and Monet which were 350Kb, 450Kb and 400Kb respectively and had as far as I can tell all the functionality of my Word, Photoshop, and Painter that run 10-40Mb each not to mention my 200Mb RAM WinXP with its weekly 10-20Mb patches! Software bloat in inexcusable. I can't for the life figure out what Word has over right now. and I could never understand why ColorIt! had more functionality, better interface and a $39 price tag. Once long ago way back when I was actually a programmer, elegance and economy of code were the end all, the more code you wrote the cludgier a loser you were. But a friend at Adobe used to tell me how the suits actually foster inefficiency intentionaly. Now iPod has gotten hold of my system and I can't root it out!

What antivirus program are you using? Norton and McAfee are notorious system hoggers, more than most other antivirus products. And a Celeron 2.5 Ghz - NOT the best CPU architecture for Poser. You're better off with an Athlon64 - more computing power per dollar, except for some specialized apps (3DS Max has Pentium 4 optimized libraries, for instance, and some multimedia apps also make intelligent use of the longer P4 pipelines. Poser is NOT optimized for Pentium 4 architecture).

I had some terrible Yahoo ap my ISP forced on me as some partnering deal. I have pulled it out by the roots and I am hoping the freeware AntiVir XP will do the job. Still even with my anti-virus turned off I hit this weird wall with figures over 30 or 40,000 vertices... I can put as many V2 and M2 as I want in a scene practicaly but if I bring in a blank V3 it all goes to hell. Weird. I apreciate you guy's help... maybe it is a CPU problem, maybe it is the off-brand memory I have?

Hmm. I have an AthlonXP2700+, 1 GB RAM (Kingston HyperX), 2x80 GB in RAID 0. Somewhat faster than your system, not very much faster. It could handle six V3s fully loaded with morphs in Poser 5 SR4. No virus checker. I do not overclock. I prefer system stability over a 2% performance increase. Another system, P4 2.8 FSB 800 HTT, 1.5 GB Dual Channel DDR400 (2x Siemens, 2x Kingston ValueRAM), 160 GB disk, would appear to be slightly faster - more and faster RAM, a slightly faster CPU. In Poser, it's not. It's slower than the AthlonXP. And the Athlon can handle more complicated scenes than the P4. Could be a graphics card problem, though. nVidia tends to play nicer, and needs less driver processes than ATI.

For P5/6 i would suggest to get al least 3GB RAM, so Poser can use the whole 2GB XP allows for each process. A celeron is also not good for rendering since the mathprocessor is missing. A regular P4 or Athlon 64 would be a better choice. For P4 the 5xx series is ok P6 does not make use of Hyperthreading and XP64. For the future a 6xx or 8xx would be better.

My current modeling system is an Athlon64 3500+, 4 GB DDR400 Dual Channel (Transcend), 2x 73 GB WD Raptor 10,000 RPM, 2x 160 GB Hitachi 7200 RPM in RAID0, and a Geforce6800LE tweaked into a Quadro FX4000. It is about 30-40% faster as the AthlonXP in general use. It cannot handle larger scenes than the AthlonXP, since Poser can't use more than 2 GB of address space (either physical or virtual), though it is significantly faster when rendering - much less swapping. I'm considering an upgrade to an Athon64x2 4400+. Not for Poser, for Vue and Max, those apps can use multiple CPUs.

svdl, you are right the new Athlons are faster rendering than Pentiums with C4D and VUE.

My 1.5 gig P4 chokes if I try to use M3 and the Freak in the same scene. I only have 526 ram however. I have learned that I can pose a whole army of M2s and P4 figures in the same scene with no problem or if I use Freak with the previous generation of figure. For this reason I'm not overly fond of the new generation of Poser people. I hope when I upgrade my PC in a few months it will help, but I rather dislike Morph injectors and have had numerous system crashes loading them in P6, while I have had no such problem in Daz Studio.

It real seems like I can load so many P4 and M2 figures but one M3 kills me before I even start with the injections ???