he problem I was whining about last night with BLBarret's LifeForm wasn't a memory prob it was and is a diskspace problem. I have 6.5 G's free on CDrive, and 7.5 gigs free on D drive where Poser lives. I'm trying to render fairly large, it's true. 2500 square at 200dpi, I've dropped that to 1500 square at 72 dpi and still no go. Does Poser need more than 6 gig's to render??? Or is something else wrong? Emily

What happens exactly? What OS are you running. How much ram, etc

You should be fine. I had a wonderful....groan, cry...computer that got stolen, while i was at my office. I am on a really craptaceous one...given to me by a friend. If you have a prob doing renders in poser....just shut your computer down for two or three minutes. don't hit restart...just shut it down. Why...poser allocates memory weirdly. their used to be some gurus here, who could explain exactly why. either they have left, or, are laying low. also, if you do have a small hd...it is best to render with nothing else running. in other words...don't render and cruise renderosity at the same time. also...cleaning out your windows temp and temporary internet files will help, as well. even with dual hds...memory is shared in the one, overall machine. Pop...Pop...Poppi

thats why I asked the above. I could not render using Win98SE...switched to Win XP and all works fine.

Methinks that Poser was more dos based. i think that there will be always, problems with running it under a windows based system. just another thing on my wish list. IF there is ever a poser 5.

I have XP-- sorry, a friend came over and insisted I be sociable-- and this is the first time this has happened with XP. I usually like to render at twice the size of the final piece so I can clean up joints and hair better, and get more detail. Pentium 4, 1.7GigMhz processor, 512 RAM which is max on this machine. You know what's weirder? I sized up the display window to over 1000 pix and rendered in the window just fine-- with all the scenery put back! This is after it had told me there was insufficient disk to render to another window at 1000 72 dpi. Needless to say, I saved that puppy quick and will finish the pic later tonight. I have a monster Poser folder. Which might be part of the prob, I also have a new FireWire HardDrive I'm going to put in that's 120 G-- just for Poser-- the firewire card just arrived. I didnt want to have to swap it though before finishing this render because you know how many things can go wrong when you add hardware. And then move Poser to it. It was strictly rendering to a new window that killed it. Fortunately I have a big screen-- this is a portable but it's a bigger screen with a bigger resolution than my desktop-- 16 inch LCD, 1700 something res, I could have made the display screen 1500 and rendered that way. It's just a bit easier to lose the render. Emily

Wow...your system sure shouldn't be the problem. I've never rendered anything that large, but just for the heck of it, as I'm typing this, I have a 4000x4000x200dpi render going of a fairly simple scene...the PWFW bedroom with Vic2 and Mike 2---dressed and textured. It seems to be going fine... Did you try to clear out all your temp files, etc ??? defrag your hard drive? Sorry to go here, but I just went through some major problems with temp files---had to go into the registry to clean them up...my system was at a crawl....could barely read my email....finally got those temp files deleted...all is working to par again. Well..its done..and it worked..61meg tiff file...huge :)

I also ran into this problem in the past. Substantially enlarging Window's virtual memory swap file did the trick for me.

"This is after it had told me there was insufficient disk to render to another window at 1000 72 dpi." This is the classic error message you sometimes get with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Two fixes have been suggested: 1.) Readjust the swap file (that is usually if you have Poser and your operating system on the same hard drive...) 2.) My best solution was to give Poser its own 30GB hard drive. I rarely get that error any more. When I do, it's time to defrag the drive. Sometimes I defrag both hard drives. This is one of those Frequently Asked Questions that gets asked and answered several times a week.. by the way. In my experience, your free hard drive space is very minimal. Look at this screenshot showing the file size of a typical render I've done. It's saved in pz3 format. You couldn't even save this on your hard drive! You should think of finding more hard drive space... rearrange things if possible, or perhaps get a larger hard drive and dedicate it to Poser. Ron

Just a little addendum to what what wrote, most of which is accurate and helpful. It is advantageous to keep your swap file off of the same drive as your systems files. Actually the best-case-scenario is to spread the swap file across as many physical drives as possible without using the system files drive at all. Now unless you are running a server class machine with multiple HDD's this is not a realistic option, and neither is spanning the swap file across multiple partitions of one physical drive. The latter is definitely a no-no. For hardcore NT'ers, never put your pagefile (swap file) on a drive that is mirrored or has fault tolerance enabled. The swap file does not require fault-tolerance, and drives with this enabled are much slower than other drives. I have a main drive of 80 gigs that is partitioned into 5 16 gig drives. One drive is for Poser, Bryce, and Photoshop only. I have a seperate install of Poser on another partition just to install/test/whatever things to make sure they install correctly/work properly/don't suck befoe installing them into my working Poser application. This helps keep the size of my working Poser directory under control. Also, most importantly, I have a seperate, physical 30 gig 7200RPM drive that has nothing installed on it and exits only to hold my swapfile. The difference is system performance is amazing. Hope this helps is some way. :)

Ok, my Poser folder is on Drive D right now-- 20 gigs over all, 7.5G free. I ordered the 120 Gig firewire drive because I thought this might happen, and it finally did. I never run Poser on the OS drive. But I thought 7 Gigs empty space would be enough, it's not. Poser has only worked for me on a 40 gig partition. On my desktop I have two separate 35 G drives and Poser was on one of these-- I just can't work on the Desktop for long periods anymore for health reasons. And on this laptop, the whole drive is 40 G. So, I think it's time to add the firewire. What I don't understand is why it rendered the 1000 by a 1000 in the display window without problems, when it couldn't render the same proportions in a separate window-- with less stuff in the scene??!! I don't have much in the temp file cause I don't don't use this puter for the internet. I should defrag though. How does one change a swap file? I know how in PhotoShop, the choice is built in. I have no clue in Poser. Emily

You would have to change the swap file in Windows. Unless youa re using a Macintosh, you can not allocate memory to Poser.

You guys have gotten me confused now... I have a 40gig hd, with a 768meg swap file, 512 meg ram, and have no problems using Poser...Win XP Home What's with all these extra drives and separate swap files and stuff? I set my virtual memory in control panel, and let er rip. Been running this system every day since February...also have Seti@home running 24/7. Last night I rendered a 4000x4000x200dpi, separate window, image while surfing the web, doing email, running Seti...all at the same time. The pz3 file for this render is 38meg...the resulting image was 61meg...took less than 10 minutes to render. My Poser directory is a bit bloated as well....2.01gig in size...7,227 files/477 folders....

Dave - Don't let it stress you. :) Think of the old adage - "If it ain't broke don't fix it." :) I make my living working with NT based systems and high-end design programs (Unigraphics/Inventor/Mastercam) and we use lots of tricks to enhance system performance.

I'm relaxed...............

I'm sure Pariah has some expertise that I lack. I've been using Windows since 1995, and have tried playing with the swap file settings a few times. At times I've experienced undesired results. I've tried dividing my hard drives into different partitions, only to regret the move because I ran out of space in one partition or another. In the end, my best arrangement has been to let Windows handle the memory and swap file. I leave the swap file on the same hard drive as Windows and all the other software except Poser. Poser does just fine on its own 30GB hard drive. It's a nice simple arrangement and it works.

I'm just so old this stuff has me scratching my head=Duh! I have a gateway performace 700, 2yrs old, win98 2ndE, pent3, Fat 32, 20Gb hard drive, Rams I added to-512MB. My husbands computer is the server on a cable connection. (he has 60GB hard drive.win me.) Since we share the connection and files my computer sometimes reads his as being a second drive??? We had a Tech program all this in. My question is I only have 10gb free space, he has 43gb free space. So I store a lot on his pc. How or what should I do to make my Poser run better???? It's huge!. I still have a 1yr left on the warrenty, then I was thinking of getting a better computer. But untill then I would like to make this one run Poser great?

Emily, Sometimes the way things work just doesn't seem to make consistent sense. I ran into this problem when I purchased a second notebook with P3-1000mhz, 20 gig hd, 640meg ram. Poser would not allow large renders. But it worked just fine on the other notebook which was P3-600mhz, 20 gig, 192 meg ram. I found the "swap file" fix at Curious Labs' site. I have had people tell me that this fix is nonsense. But by reducing or enlarging the swap file I can consistently make the problem come and go so I don't really care whether it's nonsense or not. (Placebo effect for computers?) I typically have about 7-9 gigs hard disk free and a 958 meg swap file. Anyhow, you have nothing to lose by trying this and it will only take a minute to change. The Curious Lab article, with full instructions) can be viewed at http://www.curiouslabs.com/support/html/techSupportFAQ.html See question 4.

Cool, That is what I have done before and it has worked. It is probaly the easiest way to fix it. The only problem, I have is that I also have/and use lightwave 7.5, after effects 5.5 and they love a lot of virutal memory. Is there anything around lowering the settings that curious labs stated or do I have to wait for a fix from them? I am using XP and windows 2000 on the other. Can anyone help on this. :)

jval!!! You de man!! I did what they said at CL and it's rendering as we speak! When I went in to change the specs, there was nothing listed on my D drive as swap info at all. I used their 10M minimum and the regular 768M max and it worked. I don't care if it's nonsense either. I'm a big believer in the placebo effect. Especially now. Thank you, Emily

jval!!! You de man!! Well... as I found this at Curious Labs' site maybe they should get just a wee bit of the credit? LOL! Glad you got it working again Emily.