Having read all the last news, heartbreaks, sucesses and I am so thankful for P5 or I am so sorry that I got P5, was just wondering something. At this moment, besides visting here, I am rendering something I am working on in P4, got a game of solitare called spider running, and working on a story in MS Word. Some nights I add in PSP7 and Free Agent scanning the news groups. I do all this on my Dell Computer. Oh, and email is always on. I have P4 Intell process at 1.7 GHz with 512MB DDR SDram, a 64MB NVIDIA GeForce 2MX graphic card, running Windows XP home edition. I also have 40 gig hard drive. At the time this past spring I bought the most computer I could get for the money I had available. What I want to know is this. Am I going to be able to this if or when I get P5??

I'm on win2ksp3 with P5 and the two seperate service patches. Last night I had EI Universe open, Amorphium Pro, VIZ something that crunches vrml files, Bryce 5, ICQ, mIRC, Outlook XP, Crossroads, 3dexploration, and yes, P5. All at once, switching back and forth trying to get my unicorn horn set done. Not one single problem at all! amd 1.4 with 512ddr on a homebuilt system. Some folks are having great luck, others arent. I have no junkware on my system, unlike what comes with storebought puters and hartily believe that this is the reason for success. Last year I fought BSOD and finally, with the help of the MS knowledge base, was able to eliminate the culprets (which were not open at the time of the BSOD mind you). I don't know what to say. Other than some minor annoyances such as the neck line, I'm not having the problems that others have reported.

There seem to be a few who have constant problems with P5 and are quite verbal about it. However, there are many of us for who have no problems with either the program or the patch (the silent majority, if you will). I'd say get it, you'll really enjoy it. Now I'll go back to lurking.

I used to have the occassional redrawl problem in the past when I had too many programs open... occassionaly I was unable to get P4 to open again after opening too many other programs.... I have not had that problem at all with P5. I am sure you have read some stuff that is making you second guess purchasing the program... believe me the program is well worth the money.

Always keep in mind Windows is not a true multi tasking OS and P5 can require a lot of processing power. Switching to P5 when it has been running in background may not immediately show on the screen (when rendering or calculating a simulation). Be patient and P5 will show and respond. With only P5 running I just spend 20 minutes waiting for the each frame in a complex cloth simulation (after 20 minutes the frame number increses by 1 and the number after it changes, highest value up to now has been just over 2400). This is a very complex piece of cloth with (too) many collision objects, so don't panic, just wait.

"Always keep in mind Windows is not a true multi tasking OS" Compared to what? It certainly is, as of Win9x. However the memory protection increased 100 fold with the NT kernel.

Hi Normally have Outlook, PhotoShop and Poser 5 open. Have run Max 3.1 with above with no problems. From Windows NT upwards(Win2k and XP) the OS is a pre-emptive Multitasking environment. I can only repeat EricofSD comments on the poser install. Strange thing was I went through some very strange BSOD problems way before Poser 5 and cleared out my system of all kinds of junk. Home built system with 1.2Ghz AMD 512 DDR Ram P

If you are building a new computer, make it a dual processor and all the multitasking problems will vanish. I watch (divx) movies while rendering and burning a CD at the same time, no problems. /Troberg

Actually, P5 is draping cloth in the background while I'm surfing here. It seems to multitask quite properly since the SR1 patch (before that it was a pig, hogging system resources to itself--now it only hogs them from its own screed updates). I do have to watch what I'm doing because I only have 256Mb of RAM and P5 likes LOTS of memory, especially for hair. I'm not sure I'd want to try burning a CD on this machine, not while rendering in P5....it's only a 450Mhz K6-III+ But I do routinely surf the web, run Xnews and Pegasus and even occasional other apps with it in the background and it's well behaved in Win 2K pro...