I will upgrade from Poser 4 to 5, but what about the Poser 4 ? I can't really sell or give it away cuz thats what is used for the upgrade. So again, what to do with Poser 4 after the upgrade ? oh, what a tangled web we weave ...

I think that all unused, gonna end up on a shelf copies of Poser 4 should be donated to your local schools. They can't be upgraded anymore, and you can't auction them on Ebay, I'll pull 'em down faster than you can say "buy me" since it is against your EULA, I really think that more schools need to experience really cool software...and so few can afford it. I know many schools don't have computers that have strong systems to use Poser, but why not find one that has one and install it on a machine and donate an hour of your time every week to teach a few kids?! Just my 2 cents, but I gave up Teach for America for Poser so...

IIRC, if you upgrade, you only have one license still, if most EULAs I've read are any indication (Microsoft, Novell, etc are sticklers for that sort of thing.) That's why I bought the whole enchilada (at the academic price of $200) - I have multiple machines, and that way I can play with one while the other is rendering or otherwise bogged down with some foolish modelling experiment I'm working on. As it is right now, I can only have one on. (I wonder if I could do the render farm thang with P4 and P5 in P4 render mode...)

I'll probably still use P4 until I grt a super computer. Looks like you're gonna need one to use P5.

Oh... guess I was wrong - for once I'm happy to be wrong (I'm a teacher... :) ) Starlet, Re: computers... most urban schools and colleges are pretty well equipped for Poser. The oldest boxen in my classroom are the P-200 MMX machines I specifically resurrected as Linux servers. Otherwise, the student stations are P2-450 and P3-866Cu boxes. The '450s will wind up being transferred to other classes this year, then to the lower schools. But since I teach comp. sci, I usually rotate into new boxes on a 50/50 basis every three years. Same story goes for the drafting and multimedia classes. Now - rural schools are another matter entirely. I've lost count of how many boxes a few of us have helped smuggle into a neighboring rural county high school because their classroom workstations and servers were staggering along on old Pentium1 and even 66MHz 486 boxes... For those interested in education and computers, a real good site to hit up would be http://www.seul.com/edu - it's Linux-centric, but the money saved in M$ licensing fees alone more than makes up for the obstacles of learning *ix. /P

Well, just to be clear, your Poser 5 license does not cancel your Poser 4 license, P, you are correct, and this is very specific in the EULA and we take the Poser 5 EULA pretty darn seriously. I will talk to Kupa tomorrow and make sure that we are very clear about what to do with your Poser 4 copies if you aren't going to use them and so that you aren't in violation of the EULA. Even donating to schools is a tricky situation. I kinda figured this was gonna come up, but we've been trying so hard to get you guys info abut P5! We'll post tomorrow...give us some time. (YAWN! My boyfriend thinks he's lost me to 3D...gonna go spend some time with him.

Just out of curiosity, does Curious Labs have any objection to us using both versions of Poser on our own computers? I for one might consider writing tutorials for Poser 4 even as I learn Poser 5.

Yes, I too might want to keep Poser 4 on my computer at the same time learning Poser 5, is there going to be a problem? I have Pro too, but I took that one off my computer, should I put it back on to install Poser 5? Sharen

I'm all for supporting education, but I would NOT put my copy of P4 with MY license number on any kind of public computer, and don't think you want to encourage that.

Well, since I'll be getting the upgrade to Poser 5, and since most upgrades require you to have a previous version installed, I'll be keeping my copy of Poser 4 so I can reinstall Poser 5 after I clean up my harddives (which generally involves a DOS program called fdisk...)

I for one bought a whole new computer, that is just for Poser. I plan on having both on that machine. Which is my Kick butt computer and is not on the internet. I have the paint programs on drive C and Poser 4 on D, and thats where I putting 5. I might have to change Poser 4's name so the new poser doesn't over ride it. I'm sure someone will tell us how to do this. This cow computer I'm using for the internet has only one paint program and small office. Thats it. Windows 982nd ed just couldn't handle poser, even with 512 ram memory. My new computer has win 2000, and it's a dream. By the way I bought it from Dwayne at Tri-Star computers. With room to up everything and a 3yr warrenty.( full tower and lots of power) By keeping 4, I can learn 5 at my own pace, but still make renders untill I learn the poser 5.

I use to have both Poser 4 and Pro Pack on my computer and I don't think I ever had a problem with either of them. They were in different folders, so I am hoping the same will run through with 5

"Well, since I'll be getting the upgrade to Poser 5, and since most upgrades require you to have a previous version installed, I'll be keeping my copy of Poser 4" I don't think you need to have P4 installed to use the upgrade. I believe they just send you the full version at upgrade price. (with a big Upgrade sticker on the box perhaps) That's the way it has always been with other progs I upgraded from like Truespace. And that's the way it was when I upgraded from Poser 1 to poser 4. (duh) :)

zechs is right - I bought an upgrade from Raydream 4 to Carrara Studio at a huge discount from Eovia, but Carrara showed up full... I was able to ditch Raydream from my machine without a problem. Believe it or not, the "Upgrade" versions of Win95, 98, and even 2k are "full" versions... just that M$ requires seeing something owned by Microsoft on the hard drive, or it will ask you to stick a disk in. I have an old old old copy of MSDOS 5.0 I used in conjunciton with that :) /P

I think you will find that Adobe allow you to keep the old version of an upgraded product on your machine, for "transition" which covers learning the new software, waiting for plugins to be updated and file format conflicts to be resolved.

there's nothing in the ula that indicates that you can't keep two versions of poser on one machine you just can't network or let some one else use one version while you are using the other so according to the ULA the donation to school idea is officialy forbidden though the powers that be may decide to allow that as starlet said.

Why not donate it (and perhaps your time as a forensic artist) to the local police department? (If CL allows it, anturally...) It hit me this morning as I got up... Poser is the perfect tool for getting up a 3d model of bad guys or missing children. Just a thought... /P