For everyone who has poser and windows xp, is it worth it to upgrade from windows Me to XP? Does Poser work well with XP? Thanks in advance.

in most cases, almost any case it is better to get away from millenium. for myself, it is great. the computer never crashes and i no longer lose any artwork.

Poser and Windows XP. I've been using them together for about 1 year. No problems. ;=]

yes its worth the upgrade! Nomore hangs using large textures

Personally, I'd go with Win2K, but any move to an NT (aka KICK-ASS) kernal is without question the way to go. Both are rock solid. You'll practically cry about not switching sooner once you see the difference ... I know I did when turning all my machines from 98 to Win2K-Pro.

yep it's great, been using WinXP since March, I've had a few hairy moments caused by my own personal stupidity, but any version of Windows based on the NT kernel is miles better than WinME. Rob

Everyone who says that Windows XP is a good operating system has at least one if the following problems: 1) They work for Microsoft 2) They are stupid 3) They have never used it Take my advice cappy3 and buy a Mac

littlechris, in answer to your list 1) I don't work for Microsoft, until recently I worked for T-Mobile 2) I'm not stupid I just love to tinker with settings 3) I've been using Windows XP since March of this year Rob

Can't argue with littlechris here, Mac out-does Windows hands down on most everything (99.9% ?) But if you are using windows, XP is the better choice over ME. Best advice I can give is don't try to UPGRADE. Upgrading has historically been frought with peril in windows. If you switch to XP, wipe out your old ME and then do the install of XP. I've been running XP for several months now and only locked up once. Using Task Manager I was able to recover from that one lock up and continue. ** I would recommend that you get some personal firewall software. Get it for 2 reasons: 1. to keep bad things out. 2. to keep XP from constantly reaching out and talking to its buddy servers at Microsoft. WinXP Explorer, its "auto-update" thingy, WinXP MediaPlayer, and several other things try to reach out and connect to various microsoft servers. They say they're "checking for and auto-downloading updates", but it really slowed my system down whenever I'd go online (especially with our crappy phone lines where I live). I downloaded and installed Tiny Personal Firewall. It's free and does a great job. I use it as much to keep others out and to keep XP from reaching out. As for Poser on XP, I've had no trouble and it works great. Despite my complaint about XP "reaching out" on its own, I'm happy with XP (and my firewall).

yeah Viper1 is right about the Firewall, but don't rely on the built in Firewall in XP, I haven't used it but I'd bet my left leg it doesn't stop MS progs from calling home. These days a Firewall is essential tho so download one if you haven't already and for your own sake & sanity use it :) Rob

thgeisel "No more hangs using large textures"

I have been haveing problems well not problems but my AMD 1.3 w/512ddr ram and 64mb geforce2 glitches in Poser and Bryce sometimes when I try to use some of my Textures that are 4000 by 4000 resolution,is this caused by WIN98 SE not being able to use memory right?I have been thinking of XP but wanted to wait until all the bugs were out...Are they and are all of the main 3D programs and utilities compatible with XP now?

98-SE doesn't have as robust a memory management system as any of the NT kernel OS's do. And personally, I would recommend Win2k Pro. You can get it legally at a computer show for around $149, or less. You only have to futz with the standard registration number, not the activation nonsense. And with a little work you can hang almost all of the eye candy available for previous Windows off of it(Plus packs, etc). Manually, at least, as Win2k never had an eyecandy pack, and XP's won't work with it (or at least won't admit it will work with it....). If you have the hard drive space, you can set up a dual boot, and retain the 98-SE for DOS and legacy apps, and run the good stuff on 2k. Best of both worlds, and you don't have to cowtow to Uncle Bill's whims... Oh, and the 'firewall' that ships with XP is more like half a firewall. It keeps out most things, but it -is- transparent to MS approved activities. Or so a techie friend has told me. I won't touch XP in any way, shape, or form until Shane Brooks gets his 2kXP Lite program out to the masses, so I can get rid of all the deadweight under the hood... >:)

I strongly suggest you install XP onto a seperate partition or hard drive, so you can have dual boot and still use Win98 if you need to. A lot of people are still having problems running OpenGL applications with XP. If you end up with this problem, there's info on the Net that'll tell you what kind of hoops you can TRY jumping through to fix it. 'Micro$quirt' tells you to turn video hardware acceleration OFF. (That's right. COMPLETELY!.. Golly. Thank's Bilbo.) My opinion of XP... If I didn't have a couple of programs that only run well under XP, (need WDM drivers) I'd be $200 worth of seriously pissed-off. All of my OpenGL programs that run FINE in Win98, ALL crash being used in XP (pro). I even switched to what was supposed to be a "more compatable" graphics card that M$ recommended, but it didn't make any difference. Since I'm not into choking my motherboard down to half of it's capabilities, just so I can try to run XP with OpenGL, I'm still primarily using Win98. I rarely have any problems with it. Poser DOES run faster under XP, tho. Since it doesn't use OGL, you probably won't have any problems with it.

I have been using WinXP since beta 1 and haven't had any problems with software compatability, hardware is another matter. Before you do the upgrade, check with all of your hardware vendors (printers, scanners, fax, video card,etc ...) just to make sure they have XP drivers. XP doesn't come with drivers for everything. Now as far as the upgrade goes, it is best and you'll have fewer problems if you do a clean install of XP on a fdisk'd drive. Also under XP you can use NTFS, XP has better memory management than Win9x did. I have had Rhino and Bryce5 as well as Bryce5 and Poser4 open at the same time under Xp and haven't had any trouble with crashes.

I have MusicMatch, Poser, Bryce5, Outlook, IE6, Wordpad, CR2Edit & photoshop7 all open right now & apart from (a little) slowdown they all work & are not crashing. Give XP as much memory as you can afford & it'll be happy to run pretty much everything you throw at it. Rob

I did what most people will not recommend: upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP instead of doing a fresh install. Despite that, I've had NO problems to date, software or hardware related. I've been running XP for almost a year now and the stability is wonderful. My system is on 24/7 and since I've installed XP, I've never had to reboot unless I felt like it. I've had Poser, Photoshop and 3ds max 4.2 running together for hours, along with an Apache web server and didn't experience a single hiccup. Under Win98SE, my Poser installation couldn't handle large texture sizes over 1500 pixels. I might be able to get one render before Poser locked up on the next render attempt. That was with just a single figure and a single high res texture--- with no transparency or bump maps. But under XP, no Poser problems doing multiple renders of multiple figures with high resolution textures, trans and bump maps. But I do echo the advice to not upgrade from a previous Windows installation. If at all possible, go for the fresh installation of XP. As for XP phoning home, along with the suggested third party firewall solution, there's a utility called "XP Anti-Spy" that allows you to turn off the settings that causes XP to phone home, all from a single interface. (http://www.xp-antispy.de)

hey viper to help you out with this win reaching out thing, go to: control panel}sytem}automatic updates} choose whatever suits you better, like you can do the updates manually and so on..... maybe that helps to..... my two cents vince

Windows Me was spawned by Satan! XP is such a relief after a year of ME.

heh....I upgraded to XP two weeks ago...I must I love it. I did the upgrade from ME so I didn't have to reinstall poser and it works perfectly. Actually i have no problems and all my software works. I've self installed every MS operating system since dos5 and this has been painless, I can't say that for any of the others.(this includes nt & 2000)