I was previously running Poser 4 on my old desktop system:

AMD Ahtlon 64x2 2.9ghZ dual core

4GB RAM

NVIDIA 6600GT video card with 256MB memory

Windows XP SP2

And everything ran smoothly. I just recently migrated to a new laptop:

Intel Core i5 dual core 2.53 gHz

4GB RAM

NVIDIA 330M dedicated graphics with 1GB memory

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

And while almost everything runs as smoothly including render times, the one thing that's gotten extremely slow is whenever I move the mouse over a figure/element with a lot of vertices, it takes FOREVER to slowly trace and highlight each one individually before returning control to me. Even if I just move past it quickly, it can take 30 seconds or so to slowly highlight the element and then un-highlight it. On my old system it was instantaneous, like a tenth of a second to highlight and move on to the next element under the mouse pointer.

Does anyone know what might be causing this? It's really frustrating. I'm already running in compatibility mode, and I can't figure out why evereything else is fast enough while this one function, highlighting elements for potential selection, has gotten so incredibly slow.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks...

try switching to sreed instead of Opengl and see if that makes a difference.

Quote - try switching to sreed instead of Opengl and see if that makes a difference.

He said: poser 4 :)

Poser 7 @ SmithMicro - 49.99

At some point, you have to let old technology go.

The best part is now computers have enough horsepower to actually use everything that has been added to Poser 5 & beyond. 

I have a feeling that there's nothing you can do, as I've run into 32-bit applications that interact poorly with the graphics drivers on 64-bit machines.

The one thing that might have some affect is to set a suitable compatability mode for running the EXE (XP or lower).
And make sure you've installed the "large memory" update for P4.

Thanks very much for the helpful replies so far. I've stuck with Poser 4 intentionally because I've tried the subsequent versions (5 and 6 anyway) and specifically dislike them very strongly. P4 is the only option I care for I'm afraid.

The  funny thing is that all other aspects of the program work fine, with no graphical or performance glitches whatsoever. The 3D environment is completely responsive and rendering is completely accurate and fast. It's just this one puzzling problem with pre-selection highlighting. Even any of the very simple default characters like "business man" will take about 2 seconds to fully highlight an element like "head", whereas it was instantaneous before.

I have set the shortcut/EXE to run in compatibility mode already, and that allowed it to run correctly in the first place as no figures would even load on screen until I did that. If there are any other technical solutiuons anyone can think of I would be very grateful and am willing to try anything.

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Dunno if it would work, I haven't tried it yet, but there's always Virtual PC - which will make your Win7 machine think it's a WinXP one :)

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/default.aspx

Thanks.. sounds like a great idea and I'd love ot try it. Unfortunately it won't let me download it because I'm using Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, and it says only Windows 7 Professional/Exterprise/Ultimate users are eligible to install VirtualPC/WinXP mode. Argh.

If Win 7 is the problem, would there be any benefit in my trying to install WinXP from my old original CD and set my system up as a dual-boot system?

Try Virtualbox then, it's free. 

Thanks... after several unsuccessful attempts to emulate WinXP on my machine I have decided to give Poser 2010 a try..  I have some resulting questions about using it to replicate Poser 4 renders precisely, but I think I'll post that in a new thread as it's a bit off topic from the original purpose of this one..

Again I appreciate all the helpful suggestions...

Sorry I didn't check if it had any limitations :( I just googled WinXP emulator and it came up.

I'll take a look at Virtualbox, too. I have a few great games that refuse to play in Win7...

I don't know about Windows 7, but I am runing Poser4 with Windows XP64 without any problem.

Another thing is the performance of Intel 64 bit CPU running 32 bits applications. AMD64 runs 32 and 64 bits applications with exactly the same performance, but in the past Intel64 run 32 bit applications in an emulation mode with degraded performance. I don't know if this was fixed today with the latests Intel's CPUs

I seem to remember something about a parameter to set for some video cards to do with selections on screen.   Maybe this will jog someones memory ?

That would certainly seem to be the setting I'd need to be looking for in my case, so if anyone remembers such a thing I would love to know what it is!! :)

The counter-intuitive step of reducing video acceleration might help - who knows with these things.

Or try:

1. Open the file: Poser 4Runtimeprefsposer.ini in notepad

2.  Edit the line: **HILITE_BODY_PART 1 **changing the 1 to 0

3. Save the file (Make a backup copy 1st to be safe)

4. Right click on the file in Windows Explorer,  select Properties and check Read-only - I assume this is the same in Win 7.

5. Start Poser and it should not highlight the body parts. Hopefully that will fix the problem.

N.B. You'll have to rely on the body part selection list to verify what you have selected, which is a hassle but it may be worth it if it works.

I may be mistaken but I swear that after first editing the file, Poser reset the value on startup, thus the need to set it to read-only. I only played with it for a minute so I don't know if this will have any adverse effects. Good luck.

SOLVED. As well as enabling XP compatibility mode under properties, it turned out to also be necessary to:

Disable Visual Themes.

Disable Desktop Composition.

Disable Display Scaling on High DPI Settings.

Doing that eliminated the highlighting issue altogether.

Thanks very kindly to MagnusGreel for this suggestion in the other thread, and to everyone who offered their help to me with this frustrating problem. I very much appreciate it.

Congratulations :)

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