I have a question when useing a more complicated setup and backround, with a more realistic skin and hair when I set it to render it brings up the render window and it seems to stall I check to see if the program hands using control,alt,delete and everythings seems fine, I can leave it for a few hours and there seems to be no movement. How long does a render take ballpark. Or do I need to install proser again

it depends on how powerful your machine is and which version of poser you've got installed, that used to happen to me with my old machine a lowly p200 & 64Mb of ram, now I got a p4 2.0Ghz with 1Gb of ram and I never see that happen, also make sure you upgrade to version 4.03 for poser or SR3 for Poser Pro

I am running a p3 celeron overclocked to 853 mhz with 256 ram set at 100 bus speed maybe if I upgraded my ram to 512 or 1 gig it would improve

I am experiencing the same problem. Have pentium 4 with 512k of ram, but when I attempt to render a complex scene I get the "status" window indefinitely. Any ideas?

Why pay the money for a P3 then smoke it's life off by overclocking it?

Ron, I'm glad to hear you have only 512 ram cause that's as much as my new puter can hold-- laptop 1.6g processor, P4. And I was afraid I'd outsmarted myself and woudn't be able to do multiple people scenes. But you do-- you do render four people at once right? Emily

EA, he has a celeron (cheap). Besides that, he need not worry about smoking its life off because overclocking doesnt do it. All CPUs are essentially "overclocked". You think a P4 2Ghz is any different than a P4 1.8Ghz? It isnt. They are manufactured on the same process. The only difference is the 2Ghz CPUs came out of the fab able to run 2Ghz 100% of the time with the same cooling and voltage requirements, AND the company was ready to take the next speed to market. Once the company finds they are maxing out the current design (thus can not "overclock" any longer), they switch to smaller/cooler ones (ie: the .13 process Intel and AMD started using now). As long as you have the proper cooling taking place, your CPU will run fine at a higher clockspeed and last as long as it would at the normal speed. Far longer than anyone would really be using it anyway. Well, except for my PII300 thats been running at 450Mhz for 5 years. Dang thing is on it's third user. :) His problem is most likely 256MB RAM. I used to have the same problem when rendering high res pics of vic2 with high res texs and bumps + shadows. Many others had the same problems and posted them here when Vic2 was released.

Interesting. I've always been under the impression that celerons didn't like being overclocked...or maybe that was cyrix(which sucked anyway) :) ~EA

The only time I've ever seen Poser hang the way you guys are describing it, it basically has little to nothing to do with your hardware. The configurations you guys are using are plenty good enough to handle this stuff. I'd be willing to bet that the people who are having these problems with indefinate render hangs are not probably using Win98 or ME. I've had the same problem on Win98 machines, but I've never had it hang like that a single time on a machine running XP. Runinrebel, shorterbus, what OS are you guys using? My money says it's not Win XP or Win2000...

cyber-organic I think you might be right it used to happen too often on my old Win98 machine but since getting an XP one it hasn't happened....yet

C-O, I'm using Windows 98. I de-fragged and scanned as ElectricAardvark suggested, to no avail (thanks anyway). I have Windows 2000 and will try that. Haven't got a clue what clocking means.

Mine hangs a teensy bit on XP, I've found XP will take its time with some things, but it does seem to use all the memory. It is much faster on the startup, but takes Forever to Find anything! Biggest challenge yet-- Greg hair. Every puter has gulped before using it, but then goes ahead and does it. And, if I don't save the pz3 file first-- this is when starting up a new file, XP thinks there's not enough room to render-- I not sure where it thinks it is-- the C partition or the D partition where Poser is, or even the shared files folder. Emily