I want to upgrade to P6, and use it on my laptop computer. Its a Celeron 1.6mhz, with 512m ram(shared video) memory. I'm using D|S now, and it works pretty good. I would like to start using P6 because of the increased control and features. Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is this doable? Chuck

For a few months(before I got my desktop) I ran P6 on a laptop and it worked well without any problems. I originally had  512 MB RAM and it worked fine, but when I upgraded it to 768 it worked a bit better. although if possible I'd recommend getting an external HD for the additional runtimes unless the laptip has a large HD.

I have no problems with my laptop (Dual Core and 1gb ram)

I used to have a laptop. It had 512MB of DDR ram.  It was just enough to run Poser 6. I found that I ran out of memory if I was trying to do complex scenes, but for the most part I didn't have any problems. 

I've had no problems running Poser 6 and, now, Poser 7 on my older Vaio laptop ( Pentium 4 2.8, 1Gig RAM and a 64Mb Nvidia graphics card ). Actually, I've been pretty impressed what I can throw at my machine with no problems - especially as some people seem to be struggling with the latest hardware offerings!

I ran Poser 6 on my previous portable, an Acer Aspire 1703 (P4 2.66, 1 GB RAM, 64 MB shared video SiS). It worked pretty well, although the preview screen suffered from the limited speed. OpenGL worked, but slow, which meant runtime degradation of the models. Rendering was no problem, at least, no more problems than I experienced on a mid- to high range desktop.

My new laptop has a nVidia 7400 Go graphics card with 512 MB dedicated memory, plus 1 GB RAM and a Core 2 Duo Celeron 1.6 Ghz. Poser 6 and 7 both run fast and fine.

So I guess that the graphics are the main issue.

I'd definitely look into adding more memory, gchuck, otherwise I don't see any problems.

I've run P5 off a laptop with an integrated video card, and didn't have any real problems (beyond the typical Poser issues of scene size).

I have a Toshiba laptop with 2 gigs of RAM and a dual processor, but it's onboard (motherboard) graphics. I haven't isntalled Poser 6 or 7 on it because I was afraid it would not handle it withought a dedicated graphics card. Has anyone run Poser  with this typed of graphicd? It has WinXp media edition on it.

I have. My previous portable (not exactly a laptop, unless you like hard boiled eggs - it's 7.5 kgs and produces a lot of heat) had an integrated SiS graphics chip, using 64 megs of shared memory.
Poser worked, but the preview was quite slow. Windows XP Pro.

gchuck,
I ran P5 and P6 for a few years on a 2Ghz P4M, with a 32mb GeForceGo 460. Initially it had 512mb RAM, but I had to be pretty conservative about what I put in the scene. After I upgraded to 1Gb RAM, things ran much better! I'd recommend upgrading your RAM, but you'll be able to use it as is, it just might be a little sluggish.

drifterlee,
Go for it!  The use of system RAM will slow things down a bit, but with your system specs, Poser should run very well. With P7, rendering performance with your dual core processor will be very fast. You will get a little better performance if you can optimize XP, the rich media edition consumes quite a bit of RAM. I recently got a HP laptop with rich media edition (and a lot of other junk HP installs on the system) and straight out of the box it was taking over 450mb of RAM.  I shut a few un-needed processes down, and uninstalled Norton Secutity Center/AV, replaced it with AVG, and got back over 150 mb (norton was using over 100mb).

I'll try it. I always shut down all the junk from day one. I hate all that stuff.

Even though laptops don't have the same price/performance ratio as "desktops", and definitely aren't as fast as a high end desktop, I perfer them because I can work anywhere I want (well, anywhere within reason). 

I really like to get comfortable in a recliner while I work. I have a laptop "platform" to set the machine on so it isn't sitting (touching) my legs. It allows air to flow between my legs and the platform , and the computer and the platform. If the laptop was sitting directly on my lap/legs it would get very uncomfortable ..... OK, just to darn hot,  to work for more than 10-15 min. If your carefull, and make sure you have good air circulation to the hot spots, a well designed laptop can sit and render for many many hours without having any heat isues.

Your rig sounds essentially identical to my first rig, on which I ran Poser 6 for some time with no real dramas to speak of.

You'll definitley get the old 'Out of Memory' message every now and then, but that's something practically every Poser user is used to seeing.

It's just a matter of figuring out how to shoe-horn your renders into your limited memory. Bucket size, texture size, no texture filtering etc. In fact, I still optimise my scenes before rendering, even though it's not completley necessary any more.