Hi, the fragmentation of the hard drive does produce a performance hit, since the swap file is located there and this is what supplies the addtional working space for the program. I'm really concerned about the win xp 32 os with 4 gigs of ram because the hack used for this setup is unsupported by Microsoft although this method debuted on the Microsoft Developers Network site (they say: "only to be used by knowlegeable end users"). If your bios dosen't meet the requirements, then you'll end up with an unstable system.Ultimately it's the os that decides whether it's a go,  not just the motherboard manufacturer.  Additionally usb drives are much slower than internals and so will  take longer to supply data to the program/os as needed. Unfortunately, if you really want to minimize memory issues, you'll need a 64 bit system with more like 8 gigs of ram. Under these conditions most memory problems vanish in Poser as well as Windows itself. Oh and despite what you'll read about Vista on the net, I'd upgrade to it. Since service pak 1 it's  become very stable. Anyway, I hope you can resolve your problems.

Regards...