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