Hallo! :D

 I am currently running a decent machine with XP 32bit and 2 gigs of RAM. Soon I'm going to be reformatting my PC and I'm considering picking up XP 64bit and stocking up on more RAM.. hoping it'll speed up Poser a bit, since it feels really sluggish at times. 

I was wondering if this was a good idea? I'm reading about compatibility issues and I'd rather have my computer be stable.

If it is a good idea.. how much RAM is the maximum? Or better yet, what's the best amount of RAM to get? I don't want to get 6 gigs and have my software only use 4 gigs!

 Any information would be much appreciated!

I use it, and it's faster though it depends on what kind of scenes you do. You'll see more benefit if you regularly do heavy scenes that run out of RAM. In those, ppro will use all the RAM you can throw at it and render much faster. In smaller scenes you will see a lesser improvement.

Also note that while the rendering in ppro is 64 bits, the rest of it isn't. This means that there is still a practical limit to how complex a scene you can work with. If it takes more then 3-4 GB RAM (unlikely, but it can happen) then you will run into the same problems as 32 bits.

As for XP64 compatibility issues, there are virtually none now except for perhaps printer drivers for some companies/older printers. If you're worried about this, wait a few months and get win7 64 instead.

agree with above

Poser Pro /XP 64 bit user here, and I ALWAYS do heavy scenes.
Extra RAM is a great idea. I've got 8 GB on a Q6600 system, and the FFRender64 regularly uses 7 GB.
Speed: usually the same as under XP 32 bit, sometimes a little faster.
As soon as the render engine needs over about 1.5 GB, your system will start swapping; in XP 64, the same happens, at a threshold of about 6 GB (on my system). So moderately complex scenes render very much faster than under XP 32 bit.

I dual boot XP 64 and Vista Ultimate 64 both with Poser Pro and PP runs like butter on Vista!!  It's ok on XP but sooooooo much better on Vista!!  I had every intention of continuing to hate vista until I saw how amazing Poser Pro, MAX 9 and Crysis and CoD4 ran on it.  If you're upgrading ram maybe just double what you have.  I only (ONLY LOL!) have 4gb but the programs and games I want to run all work amazingly well!  And if you're a Vista h8tr then maybe give it a try!!  I'm glad I did!  

Gerard

OK on Vista 64bit...but if crashed, run it like administrator and put it in XP sp2 compatibility mode...

Yup, running xp pro x64 bit and PoserPro...it's all good!

I use PPro on my older Opteron 185 Windows XP x64 box and on my newer C2D Vista x64 machines and it works fine on both.

If anything, on XP x64 it seems like it renders a little faster (Vista is pretty bloated), but Vista is more stable. The one killer thing I run into on XP is that PPro does not like to have multiple monitors enabled, it majorly slows done the OpenGL preview, Vista does not have this issue. Since I work on dual 22" screens, I perfer the Vista setup.

Hi,
I had Vista 32 Bit, and uninstalled it because the OS kept the computer busy.

I up/down (?) graded to XP64, now CPU and disk is available for the applications!
I'm much happier with XP64 than with Vista.
Also my impression is that I have less PoserPro crashes with XP64 than with Vista
(still too much, though)

Some drawback is that my mainboard (ASUS) does not work properly with 8 Gigs
of RAM (no overclocking done, still when it's cold (!), I get frequent bluescreens)
so I've downgraded to 4 Gigs of RAM again. :-(

Best regards,
   Michael

I use Poser Pro with XP 64bit. It works for me. I've been using XP64 for about a year and a half, back when I installed it many applications had problems with Vista 64 bit - and 32 bit too! If I were installing now I'd probably go with Vista since the application vendors have fixed things.

Intel Q6600, 8GB RAM, Asus P5B m/b.

Quote - Some drawback is that my mainboard (ASUS) does not work properly with 8 Gigs
of RAM (no overclocking done, still when it's cold (!), I get frequent bluescreens)
so I've downgraded to 4 Gigs of RAM again. :-(

Does your BIOS give the option of configuring the Northbridge for Memory Remap Feature? I found that enabling it gave me the occasional blue screen, plus Memtest86+ failed one of its tests. So I only can use 7.5GB RAM instead of 8 :(