Hi all, I've probably answered my own question, but I'm hoping I can run P5 with my P3-450 with 384MB Ram (Win98SE). Currently it gives me the famous "Blue screen of death" every time I try to run it. Has anyone else been able (or tried) to run it on anything less than a Px-500? I noticed there was no icon created on my desktop during the install - is this by design or is there a problem with my setup? I've tried installing the software twice with no luck. Thanks for any help; I knew it was about time to upgrade, just didn't think it would be quite this soon. :) Cheers, Bonzai Gopher P.S. Love the images people are making so far; hopefully I can play soon too!

I'm interested in hearing more about how it actually performs on other users' systems too, as I've heard many conflicting stories lately. I have a 1 gig AMD Athlon with 256 RAM and XP Professional and P4 moves along extremely well. Anyone think that might not be enough for P5?...because I can't afford to buy P5 and upgrade. ;| Thanks! SnowS Hoping his pictures are worth 1001 words.

I'm using an 850 AMD processor and 384M RAM with W98SE on one machine. Haven't had much render time in P5..... I just got it yesterday. I can tell you it opens and the grouping tool works great! No freezes in the joint editor either, so far. That was my #1 b*tch with P4 :) HTH

For what it's worth, given my one day's worth of testing, this is what I've found. Tried installing it on my HP notebook w/950 Mhz Athlon 4 w/384 Mb. Very, very slow. Resigned myself to the fact that this was largely unworkable and installed it on my desktop 1 Ghz PIII w/512 Mb and this is, for the most part, tolerable, speedwise. The PIII also has a 64 Mb GeForce MX2 graphics card which may help matters. I would say that it probably is largely dependent on your level of tolerance, but users with older machines are probably going to be looking back at P4 thinking it wasn't so bad after all,...and it wasn't/isn't. -mkk

I'm on an amd 1.4 with 512ddr. P5 is not significanly slower. Unless I get the stopwatch out, it seems about the same to open and work with. Its just fine after a good Crown Royal Special Reserve. After about ten of those it starts spinning though so I'll have to report that to the bug committee. One thing that I do notice is that when moving Judy closer or farther from the camera, its slightly notchy. This does not occur when moving the P4 female around. So, my thought is that the interface is just as fast, maybe faster than P4 and the increase of the new model mesh brings it back to about the same as the older version with the older models. I do plan to upgrade soon. I guess Moore's Law applies. The capacity of computing doubles every 18 months and its only fair (even appreciated) that new programs take advantage of that.

I currently running it successfully on a Celeron 300Mhz with 256MB. There are some delays such as when going from the Pose Room to the Materials Room. In this case, FireFly seems a bit faster then the standard render engine. I have rendered with raytracing, dynamic cloth and new hair and they all work. Worked with it all day and only had it freeze up once. That was in the D-cloth area but I think I was pushing it with trying to get the cloth to drape over three figures plus a cube. Would I recommend running P5 on a PC this slow as standard practice? Not unless you're very patient. In a week or so, I'll have the money to upgrade to a much faster motherboard and processor. BTW, if folks are having P5 problems and their running Win98 do go to XP. It made a world of difference when I moved over.

On my Pentium 3, 800MHz, 256MB RAM desktop--slow slow slow and freezes up most of the time, several prompts to send information to Microsoft. On my laptop (not upgradeable) Pentium 3 1GHz, 512 MB RAM, its a little faster, but there are occasional freezes. Both are on Win XP Home. I have noticed that when it freezes up, and I do a CTRL ALT DEL, wait a couple of seconds, and then NOT end task, the program unfreezes and returns to normal (better than yelling at it). On my slow ass systems, I'm going back to Poser 4 even though P5 has a lot of nice features. I just can't run it until I get a faster machine. I would suggest a Pentium 4 for this program and it should have been a minimum requirement otherwise I would have held off purchasing this program.

It is mostly a matter of how much time you have. It should run on lower specs (at least as far as clock frequency goes), just slower. A slow machine should not be the source of a blue dump. /troberg

It's a tad slow on my TRS-80 and the green screen makes it pretty hard to create materials. I went to render a sphere in FireFly and it crashed at first. I disabled raytracing and it finally rendered, but it took 47 hours! :-) A.H.

is there any surport for graphics card ?? i mean ..i could not understand how CL could make a 3d program that eats ure vitual memory for breakfast !

Hiya, Thanks for all the responses so quickly!! I didn't realize so many people were having problems.. During the installation, was an icon placed on your desktop automatically, or did you have to do it yourself? I'm trying to figure out if I have a complete install or not; it seemed to go to the end - it said it needed for me to restart my pc; the first time I installed it, the pc crashed during the reboot, but the second time it rebooted cleanly - still won't run. This is the first piece of software that's given me this kind of trouble on this machine. (I'm running 2 other 3D apps, recording software, and numerous games which are notorious for being picky about graphics hardware)

You have to place the icon on your desktop on your own; it doesn't do it for you. And on the 98-SE, have you checked your swap file size? Poser in general, and P5 in particular, makes heavy use of the virtual mem pool, and the 9X line is not known for its ability to increase the swapfile on the fly. Have you run a registry cleaner, like WinDoctor in Norton Utilities? If not, you probably have a few dozen, if not hundred, dead links, hanging registry keys, etc etc.

Thanks Dale, I'll look into that.. don't have a reg cleaner - I've got around 2gig free space. I've been thinking about upgrading my pc, but just didn't think it would be quite this soon... ;) Bonzai Gopher

I was hoping 3rd time would be the charm, but no dice... I uninstalled Poser 5, and used Regedit to remove all references to Poser from my registry. Disabled McAfee anti-virus and crossed my fingers as I reinstalled Poser 5. There were no errors during the install, but when I try to run I get the blue screen of death and after hitting a key to clear, messages like: "Explorer caused an invalid page fault in module GDI32.dll (or BrowseUI.dll)" yadda yadda yadda. Could it be my video card? (ATI Rage Fury 32MB - latest drivers, GLSetup also installed) If so, it would be the first time for that... Thanks again for the advice, Bonzai Gopher

I run it in a PII 400 mhz with 386 mb of ram. Its slow but for now I cannot upgrade my computer. Hope to do it in a month or so. I wouldn't run in in Win 95, 98 or Me. I run it in Windows 2000. I'd say if you run it in a low end machine like mine, you need an OS that has a more robust memory management like Win 2000 or XP.