First, unless Poser is bizarre, everything is stored in ram before ever going to the pagefile. I could be wrong, but I tend to think it behaves like most other programs. Maybe I'll look into this...certainly interesting. That said, some pretty good advice all around. If you're using more than 256 megs, don't waste your time with with anything other than NT4 or 2K. (I refuse to acknowledge the existence of XP, other than to say I refuse to acknowledge it.) Those others won't use the ram and there's no telling what may happen. Programs may freeze, the operating system may freeze, it may run without problems, etc., but it should not entirely crash a system (gotta be something else wrong to require a format to fix it). To answer the original question though, yes, Poser will use everything you have and then some. It's not uncommon for me to check my ram and see well over 500 megs being used in a render of just Vicky, hi-res maps (the 4000x4000 body and 3000x3000 head), the up-do hair (big maps there as well), and well, that's basically it. I haven't managed to get it to use all 768 yet, but I don't normally put more than one character into a scene. I'm weird! :) And on the opinion-oriented side, BOO nvidia. Go ATI and Matrox. :D Just wait for the Radeon 8500...only a couple weeks to go. :)