I don't want to turn this into a bash anything thread, but Tom's Hardware has always said the P4s were turkeys, ;-) Intels pushing them has a lot more to do with hidden agendas than any other CPU ever sold, I think. If I was going to by a Intel system I'd go with one of the faster Celerons, AMDs are sort of a pain, too, true, for the noisy cooling fans! As to why the Macs are so slow is another story, I really think there is a problem with Posers code. I'd guess earlier versions of Poser were actually done for the Mac, and ported to the PC (some of the files have .TIFF as an extension, which is a clue!), perhaps it is done the other way now, and not very well.