I lost my old main drive to a nasty web-based virus that kept the PC from booting. I bought a Western Digital Caviar Green terrabyte drive and installed it. I then put the old drive in an external drive and hooked it to my old PC. It read the drive. I then ran a virus scanner (AVG) on it and removed the viruses. The old drive still would not boot in my PC so I kept it in the external case so I would not lose all my files. I transferred my virus-free Poser 6 and 7 to the new drive. Now they are both crashing or at best, taking forever for the cross pointer to turn to the arrow pointer so I can do something. I never had this problem before when transferring the Poser apps to another drive. I even have them on an external drive and they run fine. I even ran the virus scanner on the new drive - no viruses. Somebody told me before to delete the poser.ini but I can't find it. Where is it and will that help? I removed several external runtimes thinking that would help as in the past,. Sherrie. PS my other programs run fine. Just Poser is messed up.

PS removing the extrnal runtimes did not help.

 It sounds like you're running Poser off your external drive, which ought to work fine (I'm doing that with all Poser versions from Poser 4 and up to PP2010)

But did you reinstall Poser? I noticed that AT LEAST Poser 8 and probably (IIRC) Poser7, really likes to be installed on the computer to run properly. Earlier versions ran fine just from executing the e.e (I've - as a test - run Poser 6 from both an USB flash drive and a CD - both works!)

Try (re)installing Poser. It won't mess up your already installed content - and if you're worrying, install the Poser core files to the new INTERNAL drive and link all your old runtimes,

Poser 7 will work just fine without being installed, but I would copy your Poser 7 directory to the new drive, and reinstall Poser 7 SR3, pointing it to that directory, and it will recreate all of the Windows associations and return Poser to the default settings.  The latest Poser 6 SR may do the same thing, but I've never tried it....

I reinstalled Poser 6 with SR3 and linked the old Poser 6 (all on the main drive) runtime to it. It ran good, but V4, which is in the old P6 runtime and now and external runtime, would not load. V3 loaded fine. Any answers? BTW thanks!

I just dumped the old P6 runtime into the new P6 program and it works! I installed the P7 SR3 into Poser 7 and now it works. Something in the program must have gotten corrupted in the transfer from the old PC. Thanks everyone. THis virus really kicked my butt.

I spoke too soon. The external runtimes seem to be causing the slowdown. My external drive is almost full. Could that be the problem?

Being full doesn't make it slow. Being highly fragmented does. When did you last defrag the drive? If it was a long time, try it.

Keep in mind that external drives aren't as fast, since they are limited by the USB interface...

If all your poser files are running on your new 1TB drive and its running slow it could be because its an ECO friendly "Green" drive.... these drives are usually slow RPM drives which are only intended for movie/image/music storage, not as a main drive that intensive programs run off of.

If you want faster file access buy a proper non "eco" harddrive with decent  RPM speeds.....

Buy a WD Caviar Black 1TB drive and clone the Green drive to it. Put the Green drive in the external enclosure, and use it for backup. Put your old drive back in your computer so you can connect it to your SATA port, and use it from there. Put all your runtimes on your Black drive, and use your old drive for something else- like an internal backup. As you've discovered, backups are quite useful.

Don't forget to keep a couple images of your OS/Programs partition on a special partition of your various drives to make replacing a broken OS easy. Don't ever defragment your special image partitions, and don't move or copy the images, or they probably won't work.

Thanks. But I had a green drive before and did not have these problems, so I don't know what to think.

Read your site mail.

Thanks, Bill. It turned out to be the video drivers were obsolete. ATI no longer supports my card so I was able to copy a newer driver off my old drive and install it. Now Poser works great. Saved the drivers, too. Thanks.