Hi, (lugging the laptop onto the lap for this one :) I've never had Pro-Pack, never saw the need, but one of the things I like about Poser is that fact that it renders fast. OK, so it fakes reflections, etc. but it makes the babes look good, so what do I care :) But reading in another thread about CPU usage brought back memories of renering on my laptop, it's a PIII 700Mhz and a few minutes after bringing up Poser the fan would come on and stay on. I used to grab a few magazines as insulation, as my lap would get uncomfortably hot. I used to pose using "bounding box" because otherwise Poser became a slide show, you could see it visibly doing screen refresh, as it srained to keep up. I gave up using "fully textured" both because of frustration, and the fact that you always overshot. Poser would still be moving the figure .5 - 1 seconds after you stopped moving the mouse. Then I bought the Hires maps and Up-Do from DAZ, and that just killed my computer,I could render if one, but if I tried both, I was guaranteed a crash... So I maxed out my RAM, (512Mb) threw loads of figures including the Hires Maps and the Up-Do into a scene and hit "render" it worked! Still using bounding box, but I'm used to that by now. Then upon news that P5 is imminent, I splurge on a new box, Pentium 4, 2Ghz, but only 256Mb RAM, I install Poser and it's not until I'm mucking about with it later that I notice something. It's moving fast and it's fully textured. I tweak the face to make her smile and she does it in realtime, it's quite a magical realisation. Since then I've rendered multiple characters, using big maps, (all by Steffy Z) with bumps, "global" lighting and transmapped hair, with sundry other bits like animals and props, and it just keeps on ticking. Now obviously I have added processor grunt to thank for this, it's not simply a tripling of processor speed, but a quantative advance of the whole pipeline. I have a nice GFX card, I'm running at 1600x1200, but I know that any card capable of 1024x768@24bit will do just as well. As Poser makes no use of the graphics card except through the OS as a display device. That is after-all what the whole DirectX thing is about, making it so that programmers no longer have to hit the metal, because DirectX does it for them. All they code to is an API, it's hardware agnostic. So, if you're telling me, that with P5 I should expect to return to the days of sloth on my laptop. That even if I can find somebody to sell me 2 512Mb DDR DIMS, to max out my memory to 1Gb, (been to two local computer shops, two department store computer departments, and two wharehouse size technology stores all without luck..) that my brand new 2Ghz machine is going to revert to a PIII 700 in all but name then that's fairly dissapointing... Is the slowdown just with firefly, or does the P5-P4 renderer suffer as well? Does anyone out there have a 2Ghz Pentuim and 256Mb RAM? How do Vicky, Mike and the kids perform? What's the status of the registration process if you leave it to timeout after 30 days, do you have to re-install? Or can you get in to get a new challenge code? If it wasn't for the fact that I preordered on faith, I'd be having second thoughts by now... later jb