Hi, Well he's right about "Me" (who me? :) At least it completely stuffed my laptop, (took it a while though :) but I was also running with only 128Mb at the time. Now that MS has officially endorsed AMD (they said nice things about Bill in court. Me, a cynic? never... :) I reckon your choice of processor is pretty much accademic. Unless poser5 is tweaked to use the advanced memory pipelining of the new Pentium 4 core then the AMD will be faster for normal work. It's certainly faster at most games and other processor intensive apps, (crunching mp3's, etc.) and other things not specificaly optimised for the Pentium 4, (with the curiuos exception of Quake Arena at 1024 x 768 :) As for XP, as I've said before, from bitter personal experience I can tell you that if you choose to tweak XP, (I'm using XP pro) then the chances are it too may die horribly as did mine. However, if you install it and do nothing to it, (and by that I mean installing other software) it'll work OK. I've got the "MS Press " manual on XP pro and I've been using computers for 20+ years, and even I, (with some MS admin mates) couldn't get it working properly again once it died. We came upon the page, after continually falling back, that said, "if problems persist, consult your system vendor." :( Hovever, even with a highly unstable OS, (I only use if for poser and "the Sims" so I can't be arsed with a re-install) with 512Mb I've never had it lock up on me again. Even when it's sat there and thought about it for 30 mins, prior to rendering and made lots of "bing" noises in the background as it worked. It's always rendered without a hiccup. YMMV later jb