It seems my poser(4.03) frezees up half the time when I render. Like the pre-render pause just never ends. (RAM 256, Win98Se, AMD 500, 11.5 gig free space). Anyone else have this problems and have any tricks to help this. Maybe my machine is just too outdated?

It's Windows98. I had the same problems until I upgraded to Windows XP. Win2K is more stable than 98 also.

I had the same problem with winME. I reformated and installed win2k and haven't had it freeze on me since. :) Win98 and ME have a really bad memory leak problem which in turn creates the problem for Poser. Pendy

XP helped me a lot too-- ME would freeze horribly and the only computer I have with 98 is too slow to try Poser. I can use it to download .exe files I can't handle any other way though. XP still holds it's breath like it's going to freeze, which nearly gives me a heart attack-- but it only has once when I got in an endless round about with bum maps and then it only froze that section of the program-- the open window, which I could take care of with ctl-alt-delete and continue to save in Poser. If I'd known that before that alone would have gotten me to upgrade. Emily

Yeah, the only thing that happens to me now is that win2k has a thing of just all of a sudden restarting itself and I have NO clue what is up with that. Pendy

I already made comments on such problems .. the fact is, if your win98se in configured as a server with virtual memory up to twice physical memory, raise to 3 times ! ... two more things I noticed : 1) Poser big rendererings don't like to share memory with other applications, so before rendering use a killer tool such as 'Enditall', and break your net connect. 2) Win98SE is not stable at all, especially concerning memory, there is a patch (great one) that fixes most of the problems which is called Upack1.2 (if you don't find i'll give you the URL). In fact, there's no need to change your OS ... Win2K has it's own difficulties and limitations ... so before switching, think twice ... Regards, PhEnIcE (OJM). nb : I have 2 machines both running with win98se+Upack1.2, the one acting as a server is the one I use for Poser, when I make big renders I kill any other threading process ... and as an example I only reboot 1 time every 24-48 hours ...

I regularly do Bryce renders and Poser renders at the same time with XP, but could barely complete a Poser render if I used more than two or three props with 98. XP and Win 2K both have problems, but stability is really improved with both.

Thanks all! I am goona go for unpack and give it a try :)

If you have the link I would appericate it. When I am searching for it I just keep getting pages that have spelled unpack wrong

I experience this problem more with ProPack than I did before upgrading. I installed a memory manager, just to see what was happeinig and discovered that when Poser seems to "freeze" during the pre-render (awaiting shadow map) there is still PLENTY of free RAM on my system. Furthermore, this is not a true "crash" because windows reports that Poser is still running (ie: responds to a query from the OS). So my conclusion is this is some kind of infinite loop that Poser goes into, and not a crash at all. Eventually this infinite loop may LEAD to a system crash, but that is not the CAUSE of it all. It is definitely a Poser problem and should not be blamed on the OS. I've tried communicating this with CL but they have their heads in the sand. Like they say there is NO problem with magnets in ProPack - Laugh!! Oh well - don't expect this to be fixed in Poser 5 with that attitude.

To be honest... I have NEVER had this problem... I have an AMD K-6II 366 mhz with 160mb RAM... and Windows 98 First Edition. Go figger.

Valander: It doesn't happen often with the standard Poser, but if you have ProPack, try rendering Michael 2 or Vicky 2 with very high res maps (3500 pixels wide or more), some clothing (textured) and hair, and you will probably see it sooner or later ;) It is clearly memory-related or memory allocation related, but doesn't seem to be just an issue of RAM or hard drive space.

Funny, I was able to easily render a scene with Vicky2, clothing, hair, my Dracos Titanicus (a 50k poly model), hi-res textures, and a few other bits and pieces including a 100k poly bg with a 4kx4k texture, and had no problems...

I have ProPack and only had a rendering problem once with a particular scene. I recently installed a memory manager from MacAffee called MemoKit, which seems to help Poser render much faster on my Windows 98 SE machine. Memo Kit is fairly inexpensive and has a one month garauntee, so you might want to give that a whirl before investing $100 or $200 on XP, which doesn't always play nice with older hardware and programs. Just a suggestion. . .

Thanks. I tried the UPack program only to get additional problems. But thanks for trying!

I was going to throw Poser 4 in the trash because of the rendering problems...bought XP and you wouldn't believe the difference... I actually had 8 figures, with clothes, hair...and it rendered... Couldn't even get 1 figure with Asia textures to go before. I will say, get a lot of memory..I have 512meg..it still churns bigtime on the hard drive...if I could afford 2 gigs, I'd buy it.