I'm just curious - what kind of processor are you using? An Intel, AMD/Athlon, Duron? And what speed? The reason I ask is that on my own machines, Poser consistently is smoother on the Intel cpu's. I don't claim to know why, but that it just is. Also, Poser 4 runs fine on a 233, and heck, even a Pentium133. Less code to crunch and resources to hog. But I wouldn't put Poser 5 on a 300mhz system and expect much. And to those NOT having issues (or very few issues) - what are you running? This is certainly not a claim to know the answer - but who knows, it may help demystify some issues if there are common problems with the same system specs.

To add to this survey, I'd like to know who has homebuilts vs proprietary machines like HP, Gateway, Compaq, etc. I have more workstation problems with those 'brand name' machines than I do with the off brand or homebuilts. amd 1.4 512ddr Asus a7m266 Win2k sp3 IBM Deskstar ata100 / Maxtor ATI 8500DV No adware, no junkware, no proprietary programs for making home computers more user friendly, no Easy CD creator 4 or 5, no Norton 2001, no Webshots, no Gator, no slime at all.

I'm on a home built..I'm almost afraid to advertise it with all the problems I'm having with P5...but its a pretty stable machine...runs very nicely, except for P5.... I've actually built quite a few machines, and contrary to some of the stupid questions I ask, I actually do know a little of what's happening :) I like to hear everyone's opinions and tips...it makes for a much more rounded decision. AMD XP1800+ 1.53mhz...those 2200+ are looking good 512 DDR PC2100 Ram...need to buy 1gig more at least Soyo Dragon Plus MB...lots of integrated stuff..good/bad ??? but it has RAID...will probably RAID with Seagates...40 gig for boot drive.. 100gig WD 7200 HD--the boot drive. 40gig Seagate Barracuda IV HD...very quiet :) GF3 Ti500 64meg video 16x DVD and slow 9500 HP CDRW..need a Lite-ON 48x WIN XP Home---its cheaper

Issues? I don't about issues with P5. But I am getting lock ups, errors, and other wierdness due to sloppy programming and a lousy protection scheme. Homebuilt dual Pent 1.7 Xeon gig o' ram 100 gig HD XP Pro Matrox G450, 32meg Installed software: Norton System Works 2002 (antiVirus not running); Photoshop 6 and 7, Corel Draw 10, Illustrator 9, Carrara 1.1; MS Office XP Pro; Painter 7; Poser 4 /w ProPack; Worms World Party; and Bejeweled. All of these work without a hiccup. And then there's Poser 5....

Attached Link: http://www.medion.com/

Praxis, oh, that's another thing. A fresh run of the OS is good. Upgrading over other os's is bad. Especially if its an upgrade over ME.

Custom Built: Athalon 2000XP Asus 333 512 DDR RAM (333) Two 80 Gig HDs ATI 8500 DV (64Meg) Win XP (home) Norton 2002(antivirus off) PSP, photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, Indesign 2, Deep Paint, Deep UV, Deep 3D, Deep Exploration, Maya 4 Personal, Z Brush, Amapi 3D, Terragen, Bryce 5, Vue d Esprit 4, Cool Edit Pro 2, Pro Tools 5.1 XP, MS Office pro and a plethora of games including War Craft 3, Neverwinter Nights, and Battelfield 1942. All of thes kids get along real well in there home and display good manners. Then I let the brat in...Poser 5!

Medion pc as well similar to praxis22 Pentium 4 2.0Ghz 1Gb Ram 80Gb Harddrive 2x40Gb Partitions, system & majority of software on c: partition, Poser5 & Bryce5 on D: partition Nvidia GeForce 2 MX400 64Mb video card Soundblaster Audigy soundcard DVD, CD-RW Firewire Modem (disabled) usb Net connection Zonealarm pro Norton AV 2002 (active, even when installing poser5) WinXP home, not SR1 (won't install for some unknown reason) Poser5 is a perfect gentleman on my machine.

I have no issues with Poser 5 so far, it runs smooth and error free on this machine: Compaq Presario 8575EA Intel P4 2.2 GHz 512 Mb DDR RAM 120 Gb HD nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 128 Mb Windows XP Home Edition Norton Internet Security firewall and Norton Antivirus always enabled. Planning on increasing RAM to 1 Gb, though.

Old Machine AMD 1.2 Ghz 512Mb PC133 Ram CD/RW (Maxtor) 2x 40Gb HDD 1 partitioned into 2 20Gb slices Norton AV 2001 (on live update) Soundblaster Live! ATI Radeon 64Mb Display Cooled to blazes with 7 (count em) Fans New Machine Intel P4 2.5Ghz 1Gb Corsair PC3500 Ram(processor temporary until hyperthreading 3Ghz comes out) Matrox Parhelia 128Mb display Sony DVD RW Still Win2k SP3 Very little else, being bought up to speed as a a graphics workstaion. Also 2 shuttles being built as the start of a mini Render farm. Poser 5 runs with no problem on any system. What am I doing wrong? P

Home-built system: AthlonXP 2100+ Soyo Dragon Ultra motherboard VIA KT333 chipset 1GB PC2700 DDR memory 100 GB Western Digital HD 7200RPM with 8MB cache Nvidia GeForce4 4200Ti video card Win2k Pro No problems running Poser 5 once I applied the SR1 patch (I was getting the forearm bug pretty regularly before the patch.) I wouldn't recommend using the turbo motherboard BIOS setting on the Dragon with P5, though, as this was giving me problems. Stepping it back to the accelerated setting fixed it.

I am actually running a comparison between my machines, I have two with P5 ...I initially put it on my faster cpu system, 1.5 ghz, pent 4, 768 ram (upgraded ram and eliminated lots of problems just to start). Nvidia Gforce3Ti200; xp-pro ...P5 works ok but is slow and has repaint problems sometimes...other machine: amd Atholon at/at compatable; 1.5 g ram; Win2000; P5 works very well, no slow render problems, do have the post patch bump map c exception showing up; otherwise it works fine; Both are home built systems, no roxio; nero; both have nortosn antivirus and firewall; my P4 resides on the win2000 system....

No problems here. Poser5 runs smooth so far. home built System: Intel P4 2.2GB 1GB classA Kingston Memory ASUS P4B533 Board Gforce4 TI4600 Ultra WinXP Pro

Home built. Is there any other way? Athlon 1600+ 1.5 g ram Win2K Server SP3 Asus A7V133 board. (sorry about that) Ati 7200s 64 and 32 on both machines. Roxio and Media Player 7 (sorry about that) Recent chipset revision and ATA patch. 40G Hard drives the fastest I could find. One dedicated to Poser 5 only. Any of you ran into network problems? I really wish I could help those that are having difficulties or are intimidated by the patch. All I can say to them is: ghost your systems and then patch on. I wish you all the best in everything.

Runs smooth on my system : P5 + SR1 patch ( still some bugs, but it's now a great software ! ) MSI KT3 Ultra ARU ( very stable ) AMD Athlon XP 1800+ @ 2000+ 512 DDR-SDRAM PC2100 Leadtek Ti 4200 @ 4400 64Mo IBM 80Go 7200 RPM - ATA 100 SeaGate 40 Go 5200 - Ata 66 Win2K + SP2 Some USB devices ( DSL modem, scanner, tablet, ... ) When I look at the differences between P5 before and after patch, I think it's mainly dealing with code issues, even if there also may have some specific conflicts - misconfigurations... I wasn't able to do anything before, now it's a real program, working great. The minor bugs will be fixed with SR2 I think.

Custom Built (by me) No P5 problems using P5 patch AMD XP 1900+ 512meg Crucial Ram ATI Radeon 9700 Pro w/ current drivers Soyo Dragon Plus MB w/IDE Raid VIA chipset w/ current drivers 80 gig HD 120 gig HD Windows XP Pro w/all available patches XP Pro OS Swap File set to 2 - 20gig HD's setup as software RAID 0 (striping) on RAID channels of Soyo Dragon Plus MB , which helped P4 tons! and helps P5 due to swap being auto managed by OS, having tons of dedicated space and seperated from OS drive. IMHO... DragonzTeeth

Custom-built machine. AMD 1 GhZ 512Mb RAM Nvidia Graphics Card Win 98

i have had no problems but a slow loading of poser itself, the machine is home built and old amd k6 2 500 mhz 640 meg ram geforce 2 graphics card win 98se

Dave-So; Did you load your P5 with the DVD-CD unit? I went through a period of -hellish- instability, and it proved out to be that type of drive. It was somehow corrupting installs; the best I could determine was it was either a physical misalignment, or there was a firmware glitch and it was losing track of what compression scheme it was supposed to be reading. And it always seemed to be most prevalent with the installers like VISE.

Dale...thanks for the suggestion yes , its the one I use for all my installs. Very possible...I know I have some CDs that don't always work on different drives...or they work on mine and not on someone elses....altohugh I have never had problems with this particular drive not installing anything correctly. Guess there's always a first. I just reinstalled P5 last night, so will probably see if I get anything back for Curious prior to reinstalling again. I'll use my burner next time...but I have to be careful, I use the 3 strike rule, and we're on 2 right now :)

And as for the specs; Home built....of course. AMD 1700+ Mismarked Shuttle AK-31 board (wanted the one with the 4 DIMM slots, but the board inside had the 2 and 2.... :( ) with the VIA KT-266-A chipset. 512 meg PC-2100 DDR RAM EVGA GeForce 4 Ti-4400 Creative Audigy Platinum. Promise Ultra 133TX2 controller card 100 gigs of HDD space (40, 30, 30) across 3 Maxtor drives, all ATA-100. 60 gigs on a Quantum ATA-133 drive. No name 56x CD Reader TEAC 16 CD-RW (Both CD's are on the motherboard IDE ports as masters) 10-100 Linksys NIC card Dual boot: 98-SE configured as a 98Lite sleek install, and Windows 2000 Pro with SP2 pre-installed. DX8.1 and latest Nvidia Detonator drivers. Audigy using default drivers. Only had one C exception, and that was when I tried to load the Hydra into P5.

Oh, forgot about Roxio EZCD 5 -Basic- (came with the TEAC drive), have not and won't upgrade from the basic media player that came with 98-2k (version 6.4, methinks), and the nice big 400 watt server power supply that keeps it all fed. Saving the pennies now for one of those $200+ Lian-Li brushed aluminum server cases. 6 and 3 external bays, plus the internal bays, plus the removable backplane-mobo tray combo, plus the hardpoints for the fans. Serious woody points, here.... =DROOOOOOL=

Two systems, both custom built: 'Work' computer no longer used for 3D graphics: Tyan Tiger S2507D motherboard - VIA Apollo chipset (2) Intel PIII 1.0GHz 1.5GB PC133 SDRAM (2) 30GB Maxtor 7200RPM drives ATI Radeon 7500 Creative Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 Linksys Wireless 2.4GHz PCI Card Win 2000 Pro SP3, MSOffice2000Pro, NortonAV2002, MSDevStudio6, Forte for Java (Java 1.4.1), QT5.0, RealOne, Poser4w/PP, Poser5, UVMapper, PowerDVD 'Graphics' computer: Gigabyte 8A-GIX 533FSB motherboard - Intel chipset Intel P4 2.53GHz 1.0GB PC2100 DDR RAM 1x30GB Maxtor drive and 1x80GB WD 8M-cache 7200RPM drive ATI Radeon 7500 Linksys Wireless 2.4GHz PCI Card Onboard audio, ethernet Win 2000 Pro SP3, MSOffice2000Pro, QT5.0, RealOne, PhotoShop 6, UVMapper, Poser5, Cinema 4DXL7.3, Python2.2, PowerDVD Problems on the first machine including occassional startup errors in P5 as well as corrupted 'rooms' and crashes on loading Hires Don. No problems on the second machine have been encountered yet. Have not applied the patch yet.

System #1 (Home) 1Ghz AMD Ath Tbird 266 1G sdram Gforce2 400MX W2K (No real errors after patch and removing nipple bump maps from some models) System #2 Dell Smartstep (portable) 2.2Ghz intel P4 256 sdram ati Mobility 4 video Windows XP home (No problems at all even with nipple bumps)

i think i'm in the no-problem camp. i have had SOME problems, but i think they are due to a shortage of memory out here. custom built: a-bit bx-6 rev2 motherboard celeron 466 cpu 196 (now 256) meg ram elsa gladiac ii 64meg video card os: win98 se i got norton, roxio cd, and a stupid driver to make my 3 button mouse a 3 button mouse in my tray. oh, and winclock (no the windows clock, an ancient 16-bit clock app.) i have run p5 with my dialup, zone alarm, web washer, netscape, and trillian running. the only problems i've had was... one image would not render. no, two images. again, i think it is a memory problem, where i don't have enough to load all the textures and do the shadow maps and what-not. this morning, i had a caught c while trying to load textures for a render, but this scene was monstrously huge, so i'm not surprised. oh yeah, i installed the sr1 patch last week. not even having problems with the supposedly problematic files that cause problems in 98. go figure :)

Eric, Nope, I "inital" installed XP Pro over the pre-installed version of XP home, completely re-partitioned the drive at that point too, added the 20Gb drive later. Thinking about it, I have Nero installed too, for the CD-RW. I think what I'm going to do tonight, is experiment with the crack on my laptop, I don't need to worry about not being able to to re-auth, and I can always re-install, reformat later. But my laptop was a vanilla install using the same XP Pro CD, but then I patched it with XP SP1 without a hitch. The machine's a PIII 700 with 512Mb so it just makes the recommended spec. I'll let you all know what happens... I should mention at this point that I did buy P5, (from egi.sys) and I have a valid registration code from CL, etc. But I'm interested to see what happens. I'm going to back up my data area to my USB external first though, just in case. And no, I'm not going to tell you where or how to find the crack... Buy your own copy! later jb

Dale B: I had install problems and couldn't restore my backed-up data from CD with a Ricoh CD-r/DVD after installing XP, and lots of "saved by BURNproof" messages with 98SE before that. Searched MS and found a suggestion that the data transfer might be too fast so I went into the BIOS and switched from UDMA2 to PIO4, end of errors.

Ok... here it goes : Intel P4 2.8Ghz 1 Go RAM (DDR) ASUS P4T55Be motherboard (or something like that) Windows XP Professional GeForce 4 Ti 4600 Sony DVD+RW / CDR combo Onboard Intel Ethernet card and Audio and Poser 5 crashes after about 10 minutes, regardless of the 'room' used in the program. Firefly is rather slow too (slower in preview mode than poser 4 rendering).

I forgot to add... home made :)

P5 is running great (not perfect) on my machine. I also installed the patch: Alienware MJ-12 DDR: 431 watt pwr supp. Asus A7M266-D Dual AMD Athlon MP 2000's 1 gig of PC2100 RAM NVidia Geforce 4 TI 4600 w/128 MB Seagate Barracuda 80GB HD SB Audigy Platinum External 40 Gig Maxtor Firewire HD Samsung 16X DVD Plextor Plexwriter 40/12/40 Windows 2000 Service Pack 3

P5 runs quite well, just some acceptable userinterface hickups once in a while.... WinME on a HP pavilion 7885 P5 SR1 AMD Athlon 1.3Mhz 128Mb RAM NVidia GeForce2 MX/MX400 32Mb RAM 40Gb HD Windows determines swapfile size...

RHaseltine: Of bloody course, a buffer under run. That would do it, too! Thanks for the info. I shall have to turn in one geek point for not thinking of that..... :P

Bloodsong, Your machine probably even beats mine for being a minimum. I'm running an AMD K6-III+ 450Mhz with 256Mb of RAM. I've had the usual bugs but no major crashes (occasionally Poser just exits for no apparent reason and I'm seeing some C exception errors). This machine benchmarks the same as a 600Mhz Celeron but P5 is a pretty blocky on it and I suspect some people's "problems" are due to not waiting for it. The program seems to snaffle cycles away from its own screen updates to the point where it appears (even to Task Manager) to lock up. In this case "Not responding" is a temporary condition and, if you wait long enough it will often remedy itself. It would be better to expend a bit of CPU resources on keeping the user updated as to what is going on, especially since the screen just sort of blanks and doesn't update for several minutes sometimes. This is especially noticeable on long renders and it's a memory pig if you try to use shadow maps on a lot of lights. I think my dream system for it would be about a 3.6Ghz dual Pentium 5 with 4Gb of 1Ghz ram (which should be available by the time I can afford it!)

Well, I didn't bother with the crack in the end, I reasoned that even if it did work on the laptop, it wouldn't do me any good as it's far less of a machine that my desktop is, (which I bought for P5) not to mention the fact that, like Poser4 before it, the fan would come on 2-5 mins in, which is fairly loud, and bugs the hell out of me, not to mention the fact that it gets hot, very hot... I also figured that I was quite happy to install everyone else's patch, sight unseen, so why not from CL? So I bit the bullet, and installed the app patch... It didn't die, and my USB still works, (I installed the patch from my USB drive.) That said however, the thing is still dog slow, moving between rooms is now fast, I would even say "slick" but this still doesn't take away from the fact that een with just the default Don loaded, fast tracking simply isn't. So I threw money at the problem. Another 512Mb of DDR PC333 RAM (to replace the 256 PC210 I had in) bringing me to 1Gb. I also slotted a Radeon 9700Pro, ("The world's fastest graphics card") with 128Mb DDR RAM in place of my 64Mb GeForce4 440MX. This thing cranks out a 8700+ 3D marks at 1600x1200, 32bit with 2x Anti-Aliasing in hardware. It's a "Sweet" card, which Poser5 is completely oblivious too... It's still dog slow. At this point I'm thinking, it can't be me, it must be the software. So I begin to experiment, slavishly going through every option, (as a good beta tester would :) and I found the following to be both consistent a reproducable. The "fast tracking" issue. This appears to be caused by teture settings. If you have your default display set to texture shaded, which mine is, then fast tracking isn't. Even with "default Don" it's noticably jerky. Add hires figures, textures and hair, and it's just dire, a dead sloth would move faster. However, if you select "flat shaded" as your display mode, then all is joy and contentment, even with many hires figures loaded. But why? you may ask, should texture settings have any bearing on figures made up of purple bounding boxes? IMO it's a bug. (Suprise, Suprise :) Poser4 doesn't do it. In fact, if you load a stock Vicky1 and add "Gia" (a BIG texture) via the supplied MAT files then you'll discover that full tracking is slower than fast tracking regardless of the shading method. Similarly, fast tracking is faster, even when fully texture shaded. But why I hear you say can't I just live with flat shaded when posing? The answer is this. Global lighting. With global lighting on, sans textures the white figures are ultra bright, so bright in fact, that on my monitor, (a 21" flat Trinitron tube) it painfull to look at, let alone work with after a few minutes. It also makes depth perception all but impossible in a scene. Bugger! The other "issue" is of the more common, focus problem. I created a scene, 3 vic, 2 mike, Gia on women, Edo on men, Daz hair on women, men bald. This was so slow on P5 that the dials were useless, I had to click and enternumbers manually and wait for redraw. So I loaded the .pz3 into Poser4, texture shaded, fast tracking, and it was a joy to use, fast as ever. Though it must be said that the women seemed to lose thier poses completely, and the men altered thiers, but no matter. I then reloaded the saved P4 .pz3 back into P5, and no matter what I touched, from the display window menu's, be it figures, hair props, camera's or lights. Or equally, from the menu's above the dial box, I just couldn't change the focus. Untill hat is I clicked on a body part within the scene, then I was able to move freely again. If it works for you, you're lucky. If it don't, you're stuffed! No matter how much money you throw at it. So far I've spent 1,700 Euro's on hardware, (not counting the cost of the P5 upgrade) and basic posing with anything other than the default chahracters, untextured, is like wading through molases. P5 also loads a lot slower with the Patch installed, at least for me. The upside, is that it's a dream machine for games, 6xAA + 16x anisotropic filtering will make even the crudest DirectX or OpenGL model look good. But it's basicaly useless for what I bought it for. I reckon that a 4Ghz Processor and 4-8Gb of fast memory should see it work OK, that way you could load the entire OS into memory and not have to page out at all. 6 months to a year, should see you sorted. With the Pentum 4, now at 3Ghz, and Morre's law still in place, (processor speeds double every 18 months) I reckon that puts us at 6Ghz in 18, or 4.5Ghz in 9, provided nobody comes out with a quauntum leap before that. I can wait :) later jb

I hope CL addresses your fine detective work in the meantime see you in the WarCraft 3 zone(battle.net)

I think not. Somewhat ironically, I'd much rather beat a machine than a human, It's usually harder and more satisfying. I've never played an online game and I probably never will. Warcraft 3 looks fairly sweet though. I've just bought a magazine with the UT2003 demo on it, give the new card a workout :) later jb