Is there a way to increase the amount of RAM available for Poser so i can work without my system locking up due to low memory resources. I looked at the help file and it said this under Windows installation. "TIP: Increase the RAM availiable to Poser by allocating any unused RAM to it. This allows poser to run faster and handle larger files and renderings. However be sure to leave some RAM for the system software. System software must dynamically allocate RAM to itself if required." Thats what the readme says so how do i go about increaseing the RAM available to POSER. I have a P3 500mhz with 512MB and a 16MB Voodoo 3000. Thank you for your time. Happy Rendering and Keep Smiling God Bless rodpanther

That message was aimed at Mac users as far as I know.

Ok Jeff TY, i guess im stuck in lock ville. I can only do a few renders then i got to reboot and it is a pain cause im working on a new character for Vicky 2 which uses very hi res textures and bumps and well working from Photoshop 6 then importing them into Poser 4, seeing how they look and back to Photoshop again to modify then bam reboot time. Well i will work away with what i can and hopefully put a preview of her soon on here or the gallery :) Happy Rendering and Keep Smiling God Bless rodpanther

Yo Rod, I have exactly the same problem, and I've mentioned it to Curious repeatedly over the months, but they seem to want to act like there are no problems at all. It's infuriating because we all know that the program starts screaming as soon as you load a couple of high-res models with textures. Here's their latest response to my request. I found it pretty perfunctory - verging on patronising, but there's just the tiniest chance that there's something hewre that might help you... If you do come up with a solution, please mail me. > Hiya, > > I have Poser 4 and the Pro pack running on an Athlon 1.2 with 256MB of > memory and plenty of hard drive space. > > The program slows down to a crawl as soon as I add a couple of characters, > but if I import a 3D prop such as the Daz rowing boat, the program can > grind to an absolute halt. Furthermore, even if I stick to the simple > character models, after I've loaded a few then deleted them, the program > crashes or locks up. RUN A FULL SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC AND BE SURE TO CHECK YOUR RAM. WE HAVE HAD REPORTS OF BAD RAM WITH P4/ATHLON MACHINES. ALSO RUN DEFRAG, SCANDISK, VIRUS CHECKS, ETC. YOU CAN ALSO: - DOWNLOAD LATEST QUICKTIME - INSTALL LATEST VIDEO DRIVERS - INSTALL OS PATCHES - ALLOCATE MORE SYSTEM RAM PER YOUR OS INSTRUCTIONS (START>SETTINGS>CONTROL PANEL>SYSTEM) - IF ALL ELSE FAILS, BACKUP CUSTOM CONTENT, COMPLETELY REMOVE AND REINSTALL POSER AS FOLLOWS: * WITHOUT PRO PACK: POSER 4 POSER 4.03 UPDATER * WITH PRO PACK POSER 4 PRO PACK PRO PACK SR-2 (DO NOT INSTALL ANY OTHER UPDATERS/PATCHES) ALSO, WHICH CHARACTERS ARE YOU USING? DOES THIS PROBLEM OCCUR WITH ALL FILES OR JUST A FEW? IF IT OCCURS WITH ONLY SOME ITEMS, THEN THOSE ITEMS ARE PROBABLY THE ISSUE AND YOU SHOULD CONTACT THE SOURCE WHERE YOU OBTAINED THEM. > Poser seems to handle resources extremely badly, and does not appear to be > fully releasing memory after characters have been deleted. DEFINITE CASES OF POOR POSER RESOURCE USE HAS NOT BEEN REPORTED AS AN ISSUE EITHER BY OUR QA PEOPLE OR BY USERS. (Ha ha ha ha - my comment!!!) WE HAVE SEEN RAM ISSUES WITH 1GHZ MACHINES AS THE MAIN CULPRIT SO FAR. > I assume it doesn't use Direct 3D or Open GL which could have made a big > difference. LACK OF ACCELERATION IS CLEARLY SLOWER YET ALSO MORE RELIABLE IN SOME WAYS. > Are there any techniques for releasing memory back to the system, or > improving general system performance? PLEASE REFER TO YOUR OS DOCUMENTATION.

Not to be offensive, but their techs are probably right that the problem might be with your machine. I run 320 megs of RAM on a P3 500, Voodo 3000 16 meg video card. And it takes a lot to slow down Poser for me. I use the 3D-Worlds along with butt loads of props and figs(the saved PZ3's weigh in at 70-80 meg) before it starts to really slow down. And when that happens I usually have winamp, photoimpact,P3do and several browsers open. I would try their tips and even go as far as doing a uninstall/reinstall rather than assuming they are trying to get one over on you.

Well thansk for the tips, i dont know why it does it and i dont have any other programs running except the two Poser 4 pro pack and photoshop 6 and even when its just Poser i get locks. Now i got FreeMemory pro to auto free up my unused memory and it helps a little but same problem when i render then fix a texture and rerender again it just hangs. Now i could unistall it but i got like over 6gb of poser models in my poser directory and that would be a nightmare to back up. Anyways i will work away with what i got and hopefully get some images down of my new character soon :) Think of Sea Maidens :) Happy Rendering and Keep Smiling God bless rodpanther

Download Cacheman 5 frow ZDNet, it helps a ton! Also Rambooster.

No offense taken, and I'm sure open-minded to all and any possibilities, but I've had dozens of machine configurations and Poser 4 has been lousy with all of them. Of course, I've considered Curious' tech suggestions, but the program performs as badly with a fresh install on a brand-new machine, with the latest drivers, as it does on something less pristine. I don't like to be suspicious, but in my experience, software vendors ALWAYS blame everyone except themselves, and hardware vendors always blame the software people... I'm sure no Poser expert, but I'm reasonably competent with PCs. The fact that this is the only program that shows such poor performance definitely makes me point the finger back at Curious. Thanks for your suggestion though..

I have a 3-year-old PII/400 with 512k RAM, an 8meg Matrox card, and Win98SE. Like moonbiter, I can pack Poser 4 to the brim and keep running (albiet a tad slow). When I had the original Poser4 I often created scenes and rendered 8 straight hours or more with several props and characters (none DAZ) without a lockup or much of a slow down. Installation of the Pro Pack slowed things a bit, but not much. Michael and Vicky are what really slow me down. But I have worked with up to eight of them in one scene without a lock up. Come to think of it, Poser never locks up on me! Hey, thanks CL!

I have a PIII 800mhz, 448Megs RAM, TNT2 32 megs of RAM, I've never had POSER slow down but it locks up regularly if I'm using high rez textures. The only solution I've found that seems to help (part of the time) is to manually allocate windows virtual memory rather than let it automatically manage memory.

Okay, well in reponse to the comments from all the people here, I've finally bitten the bullet and installed Windows 2000 on my main PC, overwriting my Windows 98 installation. I've resisted the move in the past because of the trouble getting Windows 2000 compliant versions of all the programs I use regularly... Anyway, having spent the afternoon downloading Win2k drivers for my hardware, and installing the operating system, I can say unequivocally that Poser runs VERY considerably better!!! In the course of my job as a computer journalist, I had already noticed a massive impovement in 3d performance with every single graphics card tested (I recently benchmarked 10 of them under 98 and Win2k using both OpenGL and DirectX benchmarking software - see my review in Computer Arts). This alone had been tempting me to make the change, but as I have had a generally good experience with Win98, the benefits didn't seem to outweigh the aggravation of upgrading. Now, I'm delighted to have made the switch. For my test image, I loaded the ornithopter (which I've never been able to render except on freshly booted machine), textured mike, untextured mike, textured demon, textured mikey, textured victoria and P4 man. The program still took as long (if not longer) than ever to load the characters, which was only to be expected, but the really excellent news is that the scene rendered first time, even with all these models and associated textures. This only goes to confirm, as far as I'm concerned, that it was the program's interaction with the Win98 memory system that is at fault. I did try manually setting virtual memory settings under 98, but this introduced additional instability to lots of other programs, and frankly, shouldn't be necessary. Anyway, I'm delighted that the program is now running well. I don't have as much memory as some of you power-hounds, but I'm now getting the sort of performance from the program that I've always felt I deserved. In addition, my other 3D apps and games run much faster. Thanks to everyone for your useful comments.

Even though I have 512 ram, Lock up's are a fact of life for me when using Vicky2 especially if I use her up do hair. I try using her with out the bump maps and I halfed the texture on the up do hair that helped alot.

Hi, I've started a thread on this at least twice, and last I heard Win2K means you have less lockups than those using '98 or Me, but even with 700Mb+ on a 1GHz+ machine it still locks, (so I was told) it's Poser that's the problem, it's just screwy, something for the 5.0 wish list perhaps? :) later jb

Well JB, Since wrote my last happy post, I've done things this weekend with Poser that I never dreamed possible under Win98. I've loaded over a dozen hi res textures complete with bump maps, simultaneous. I've got half a dozen mike/victoria models loaded, with clothes. I have buildings, props and 3D world set - all without 1 single crash. My machine has less resources than yours. I'm very happy with Poser since Win 2k. Good luck with your system. Mat

Hi, My "machine" is a laptop, 128Mb, PIII 700, running Me, Linux, and BeOS, I do have W2K, but to install it I'd have to blank the drive and rebuild from scratch, (recovery CD) and since it's quite stable at the moment, I put up with the flakiness from Poser :) Glad to hear you have a working system though :) later jb

I wanted to chime in here. This thread is only a few days old, so I hope it will still get read. :-) I'm having the same problem, especially with high res textures. I have a 1.4Ghz Athlon with 512MB of PC133 SDRAM. I have virtual memory set manualy, with 1024kb reserved. My swap file is regularly defraged and is placed on the fastest section of the hard drive plater. I've been trying to render the Asia texture by StefyZZ, have more than the minimum hardware and memory requirements, but it locks up every time. :-( I have to reboot to try again. What is very strange is that FreeMemPro reports I still have over 256MB of ram free when Poser locks up, plus I know I have plenty of virtual memory. I found it interesting in the reply from Curious Labs above that they state: "WE HAVE SEEN RAM ISSUES WITH 1GHZ MACHINES AS THE MAIN CULPRIT SO FAR". (Their caps, not mine. BTW, funny that this statement comes right below the one where they claim they haven't logged reports of such a problem)! Could it be that the 1Ghz and up machines are doing something too fast? Either in Poser, where some part of the render set up that has to happen after something else doesn't have a WAIT programed in, because pre-1Ghz, it would never finish pre-maturely; or, some problem with the way Windows manages memory with fast machines? I don't have any other software that has a problem with my current set-up... BTW, yes, I'm on Windows 98 SE. I'm glad that Windows 2000 seems to help a lot, but not sure I want to upgrade just for poser, espescially with Windows XP due in October. Does anyone else have any solutions that have worked for them? Maybe we should start a petition to demand a fix from Curios Labs! BTW, I used to use custom high res textures before updating Poser to the Curious Lab's version 4.03, so it must be related to something in the update that they changed?

Hi, Well, I read it :) I also mailed Curious Labs, my "wishlist" for 5.0, in which I asked them to clean up the bugs from 4.0, which, eeven without further "bells and whistles" would make the upgrade worth having. Though somehow, I think this is a thread that will run and run... :( later jb

I found something that helped a lot. I still eventually run out of Ram that Poser finds usable, but I can get a lot more done before then. Instead of the textured preview mode for the work window, just use the simple shaded one. Also, makesure that either it is set up as the default on start up, or at least make sure that any figure that loads in your preferred state on launch doesn't have a high res texture attached to it at first. Using the textured preview mode, not only do I get problems a lot quicker, but when the render locks up, I still have a lot of free physical ram still available according to freemem pro. However, If I turn off the textured preview and just use shaded, I don't hang up until my physical ram is actually exhausted. There is definitely a major problem with Poser's ability to use Windows 98 (and apparently other Win OS) virtual ram. If it runs out of physical ram, forget it. BTW, I also tried freeing up physical ram with FreeMem once half my ram was used up while using Poser. What FreeMem does is move some of the info currently in physical ram into virtual ram, where it should still be fully available for use, just slower to access as you are recalling it from the HD, rather than Ram. If I do this, Poser will hang on Render, even though there is plenty of Physical ram. It just can't seem to be able to use any information that is in virtual ram! I have never had this problem with any other software. In Bryce4 (now 5), I have worked with very complex scenes with many large textures, with out trouble. It never hiccups when it's forced to use virtual ram...

My .02 on this thread: The literature has been saying for years that Win9x (95/98/ME) kernel handles memory badly, and that over 128 with 95/98 can actually increase problems. I had ME on this machine with 512mb, and had lockups regularly. Knowing my 2000 dual machine running as a "server" wasn't having problems, I still put off upgrading, hoping XP would be out before I got fed up, but a week ago lost my temper and upgraded to 2000. The lockups are no more. XP "consumer" will have the NT/2000 kernel and should handle memory better than this, even. I'm gonna upgrade as soon as I can, because this 180 day trial of 2000 will be over eventually :P I think Poser compounds the 9.x kernel memory problems by not releasing memory effectively, especially after it closes. I had regular hard lockups on exit of Poser with ME. Those are gone too. This system is a AsusBE6-2/PIII-750/512mbPC-133 Name brand RAM with a Voodoo3000/16mb card, all latest drivers. BTW, I helped things even more by installing a small (2gb) 10,000RPM SCSI drive this weekend (already had the card installed for my CD burner and another drive) and running my swap file on that. Nice to have "scrap" stuff to bring home from the discard bin at work, huh? You could do the same by picking up a cheap small drive (try stores like Computer Rennaissance) and using it on a spare IDE port, if you have space. GrayMare

Hi, Should I eventually get a desktop again, (and house to put it in, more's the point :) Then I have two flashpoint LT symbios SCSI cards (supported by every OS I own :), and enough disk, (including 2 18Gb cheetah's :) to build a fair sized RAID(5) array. Not to mention enough UNIX hardware to run a medium sized ISP, and if I could render on it, I'd be "as happy as a pig in stink" :) alas it is not to be.... :( Though having said that, I've not tried Poser on FX32! (a runtime, x86 emulator/optimiser for Dec Alpha's running NT :) But given the fact that NT support for Alpha's was never that good, and they're now on thier second home, (pending HP's buyout of Compaq) I don't fancy my chances much :) Right, back to work, (bah humbug! :) later jb