My big question for the Poser 5.0 beta testers or anyone from Curious Labs is, is Poser 5 rendering engine more stable?" I am running Window's '98 second edition and have purchase a memory cache manager, closed all other running programs in the back ground and still have troubling rendering large, high resolution images. I'm hoping the new version is more Window's '98 compatible, I don't want to XP my PC until Microsoft has thoroughly worked out the bugs. Plus I won't want to spend the bucks on a new operating system right now and risk conflicts with some of my older hardware and software.

its a question of the os not of poser.Had the same problems with win 98 .after installing XP no more problems. win 98 has a bad memory handling and those cache manager dont improve much.

If you wait for MS to thoroughly work out the bugs, you will never upgrade. Every fix comes with its own bugs. That is usually true with ANY software, not just MS. Having said that, I have the most stable OS that I have ever had outside of the Commodore 64. Oh, my OS is Win XP Pro.

considering that XP and P5 have similar hardware requirements I wouldn't upgrade to P5 unless your hardware can handle XP. the firefly renderer will likely be far more processer intensive then the present one (thus the inclusion of the P4 renderer)

Oh that's no problem, my system qualifications are: Pentium IV 1.5 ghtz processor, 526 MB RD ram, GE Force 2 16 mgbyte card, plus lots and lots of empty hard disc space.

I'm running XP Pro, 1.2ghz AMD Ahtelon, GeForce 3 64meg graphics card, 512 DDR ram, and tons of hard drive space... Since upgrading to XP Pro, not only has Poser rendered faster and more reliably, but everything else has run a lot smoother. (Had one minor conflict with a GeForce driver, but installing a new patch made it go bubye) I'd say dump 98se and get XP Pro. It's WELL worth the investment (well I'm a student and got a mass student discount so for me it was doubly worth it) If you have issues with running XP for whatever reason, try Windows 2000 Pro. I was running that before XP and it worked extremely well with my 3D programs (but if you're a gamer you might have a few issues.)

Experienced Poser users know that empty hard disc space doesn't stay empty for long. :) Poser recently choked on my 82.5MB scene file. Serves me right for trying something that elaborate under Win98, especially with only 128MB of memory. I optimized the scene file down to 19MB and then it worked fine.

in that case I would agree with thgeisel your problem is OS I upgraded from 98 to Xp and had no problems, and both poser and bryce ran tons faster. Im not sure what you might think is incompatable but you may be surprised, and in my experience XP has been rock solid, something I cannot say about 98

Install some variant of NT (2000, XP, whichever you want, it's really a matter of opinion) and you'll find life is much better (well, at least less frustrating when on the computer). Refer to a thread from a few days ago (and I'm sure many others) that discussed this exact same thing. I would attach a link to the thread, but I'm fighting for my connection to work long enough to post, let alone suffer through Rosity's awful search feature. Sorry.

How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie-Roll center of a Tootsie-Pop?

I've taken your advise and purchased the XP Home Edition Upgrade today. I hope that it performs on my computer as fabulously as it has on yours. It has been very frustrating not being able to render large images in Poser. Interesting enough I exported the same scene to Vue 4.1 and it had no problem and didn't choke at rendering my Poser image. In fact I like Vue's light set up much better than Poser, Poser's got no point lighting and point lighting works really well for inside scenes. If others have the same problem as I did, but don't want to switch OS and have Vue 4 also. I reccommend rendering in Vue. It took 3 and a half hours, but hey I got the scene I wanted with the lighting I wanted.

Poser 5 won't have point lighting (or omni lights, as I call them) either. Quite the bummer, but I'll have enough new toys to keep me distracted until Poser 6 comes along.