Some might remember a while back I posted a question about me pushing Poser too far. I couldn't get any Hi Rez textures to load in Poser and I had trouble with the New Mil Woman and Man. I had Windows 98 SE at the time and wondered if I was pushing Poser or Windows too much for trying to load large files and rendering them. We talked about memory allocation in Windows 98 and that No matter how big a memory chip you had....under Windows 98 you could only use and 128MB I think. So almost all who responded to me told me to try Windows XP....that it was working fine for you. So I decided to make the switch and I now have Windows XP Prof. with 512MB of Memory 1400MHX ADM Athalon with a G-Force 3 64MB video card. I thought things would be great. Unfortunity I'm finding out things are NOT so good. I'm pulling my hair out trying to firgure out why my large files (That used to load on my 233) won't even load. It just hangs there and my memory just runs up to the MAX while I'm looking at system resorces that's telling me Poser is not responding. Can't figure it out. In some ways it's worse than before. I did find out by accident the other day that Under Windows XP....if I have two textures of the same name in the Poser folders (even if they are in different locations)...under Windows XP...it will get confused and hang up just like the problem I'm describing. There are some large PZ3 files I've saved that have a large amount of textures in them and I'm wondering if I added a duplicate texture somewhere that's causeing this hang up? Or could it be something else? Also I have experienced another problem under Windows XP and Poser. Not too long ago I made an office scene and added two Poser figures to them and saved it. When I tried to load it the next time it hung up and wouldn't load. The only way I could get it loaded was to open up the office by itself and then Import each Poser figure seperatly. Why I have to do it this way with a Computer this Powerful is beyond me. Does anybody else have this problem? Does anybody have some answers? PLEASE? I'm using Pro Pack and have the patches....I think it's OS or something is not set right in Poser. Do certain files need to be read only? DEVON Thanks to everyone for your past help.

good news and bad news you asked if anyone has the same problem; the good news is you're not alone; i've had that problem and i thank you for letting me know because i have a price list for the athlon and memory chips as well as the windows xp installation procedure; you see i was about to make the same change to a bigger system. i thought that would help but apparently, by what your telling me, it won't help, so good news for me is i don't have to spend the cashmola on the new system. bad news is i have no idea what to do to deal with this problem. memory hang-ups have made my blood pressure go up about 20 points; i think i was about a 160/95 now i'm about 180/100 if not more. i started taking blood pressure pills for it though so if it means anything to you--you could try taking some bloodpressure meds and deal with it, if not and you find out please let me know. you could be saving a life here if not, atleast a potential heartattack victim. got to go now, getting some gauze for my fist, glass on my monitor broke and cut the skin on my fist open. see ya, --p'd off poser user

Hey Batista.... This is a follow up from another forum on this subject, I might have found the problem... Read on.... Anybody like to comment on this? I know exactly how you feel because I went through this aggravation, for a very long time, until I realized the problem was heat in my machine! and the swap size on my hard drives. If poser is installed on your C drive the same as your OS ( I use XP as well ) you need to allocate a large amount of swap size, My current size on my c drive is 14Gig and sp that windows has enough room to swap and not cause conflicts with other programs. I had tried every thing, I even removed memory out of my machine, leaving in only one chip of 512mb. Still was hanging,and was shutting down on me. I changed my geforce2 to geforce3, still same problem, changed my case to a file server, with 4 fans running in it.. still hang and shut down. Then I went and got a new fan for Athalon, and bingo, my system has not hung or crashed after that. The thing about Athalons is the heat problem, and when doing multiple applications especially 3D it really heats up! I already blew up an Athalon 1.2ghz using poser running on windows 2000. Also disk speed is also very important, if you have a slow hardrive, it can also be a problem, cause he swaps on disks, a bit like Photoshop does, having a big swap file on your c is important to run windows especially XP cause he just eats up the resources. I suggest you try changing you cpu fan to a bigger one, and not buy an orb one, they are the worst ones, I currently have a volcano6 1700 rpm it sounds like I have a plane in my office but, it has not crashed once since I changed it. Also you might consider reinstalling windows, and giving more swap space and increase the size for the C drive. I have one 1gig of ram in my machine, and a geforce3 TI 500 with a 60gig hardrive, and a 1.4ghz Athalon. Time to admit how silly i was once :o) I cleaned my CPU fan then was messing in poser and getting some of the same problems your getting Devon turns...it got worse and worse till the pc was crashing every 5 minutes...turns out i fitted my fan uoside down and the cpu was glowing LOL (still working now though in my sisters pc, good old pentium 300mhz been clocked at 400 since the day they came out ;o).....BUT saying that over on the poser list we are seeing a lot of problem with XP users and also a lot like Ron who have no problems at all, so might be worth looking at the cooling first then maybe the os.....wish i could help more coz i been in a similar problem with NT.... The reason why I agree with &*%^$#@ is because it all fits. YES All the parts of the Computer were new and installed as a MONGREL unit. I was warned and told about the Heating problems with the Athalon CPU and did have extra fans installed. BUT NOT the best ones. My computer is so quite I can't even hear the hard drive working. I have Windows XP professional installed with ALL the latest updates. I even had my computer completely checked over by a certified Microsoft tech who knows a ton about this stuff. This is one area we did NOT check but I did mention to my friend that I thought it was funny that this problem seemed more prevalent in the evenings. That would explain why sometimes the same Poser files would load and other times it wouldn't. I appreciate all your comments though. At least CYBERBABE made sence to me. I hope this is the problem cause I need to fix this now. Thanks DEVON I was just told by my friend that I do indeed have a volcano6 1700 rpm fan on top of my Athalon CPU BUT I have two other cheap fans at the front and back which probably are NOT working as well as they should be for taking air in and out of the tower unit. I also found out that my computers BIO's is set up so that if My CPU goes to a point of being too HOT (FRIED) the system will convert to a 700MHZ cpu speed and slow down to COOL IT OFF. Also having my Tower in an inclosed desk section is not helping it (even if I leave the door open). I went into my Bios to check the temp and It was at 149degrees after running for about 6 hours straight. I don't feel that's overly HOT. What do you think? Like I said before my tech friend set the Bios so if it gets to 165 degrees it will switch the CPU speed to 700MHZ automatically to cool it down. I'm starting the think it might be the swap file/memory and how much is allocated. I still will get the case out of the desk and put in new and more powerful fans. DEVON

How big are the Hi-res textures? Was the 233mhz. machine a pentium cpu? ScottA

The Hi-Rez textures are around 2500x2500. I'm starting to think it's a cpu temperature problem along with a memory seeting not being right in the OS. I need to allocate more memory for Poser. After I got off my computer this afternoon (it was on for about 7 straight hours) I rested it for about three hours and then as soon as I turned it on I opened up Poser immediately and tried to open one of those problem files and IT LOADED PROPERLY. About 20 minutes later it started acting up again after I shut poser off and re started it. The files would not load again. So I know nothing is wrong with the files...something is happening after the computer either warms up or something else is happening with system resources or memory. I checked my bio's and the CPU temperature was at 149 degrees. I think this is a bit high, don't you think? Yes the old 233mhz was a Pentium cpu. This new 1400mhz is an Athalon cpu.

Well. I guess since the files did open we know it's not Poser clashing with anything. One other thing you could try is when the files won't open. Press Ctl+Alt+Del. And shut down everything except explorer and systray. Then try it again. But it does sound like a hardware problem. RAM is usually good or bad (works or it doesn't). But what you are describing here sounds like the classic bad Motherboard senario. When the baord is cool. Everything is peachy. When the board heats up. It expands and if there is a cold solder spot on it. You'll start getting weird problems. Sound like there is a bad spot in the RAM area of your Motherboard. I've heard many people say lots of Motherboards come shipped bad, brand new. ScottA

At this point I'm finding out the possiblities of my problems are overheating of the cpu....I'm at 149degrees F. and a possible need to re allocate more virtual memory to Poser. It seem that things work fine when I first start up but after things warm up (in about 20 minures) then things start acting up. I need to check placement and proper connecting of my fans in the case tower also.

Hi, I haven't Athlon processor only one Celer on 900 mhz...1 Gb of Ram and XP pro...no problems with ... but in all magazines we can read about these "toast"processors called Athlon...you must have special fans or two ,and what is the meaning,low price Athlon processor and fans= Intel price...I can't think what's going on at summer time...open the PC case...plug in more fans !? Maybe I'm wrong...

Hi, I don't want to sound like a tosser but maybe you folks should switch to Macs. I have 700MB RAM allocated to Poser and NEVER have memory problems. Of course, power doesn't make up for lack of talent...

I finally found the problem. Thanks to everyone for your help. I just wanted to let you know that I had a computer technician come over to look at my computer and found out the following. I did not have a Volcan 6 cooling fan on the CPU as I was told. So that needs to be corrected and My Motherboard was found to have heat spots on it and a voltage regulation problem. Since this started around the time I installed Windows XP we have to assume XP caused the problem since it allows the Hardware to run faster than Windows 98...hence that's why things got hotter.

Just a note on the heat issue. Both myself and a good friend have athalon CPU's and have been very happy with them. With a large tower case that has had one extra fan added to the rear of the case, and a high rpm CPU fan a 1ghz chip runs at about 112 degrees. It seems that the athalon chip runs a little hotter than it's pentium counterpart on the average. But for the most part if you know this before getting one and cool your case accordingly you shouldn't have many problems. I also found that taking a drill to the case to allow more air to enter has dropped the core temperatue by over 10 degrees. After some experimentation we found that long slits work best for air flow, as opposed to a grouping of holes bored through the case.