Two of my Adobe programs(Photoshop&Illustrator)have the option of using a seperate disk as a swap file.Using Partition Magic,I made a 2 gig. partition on my hard drive,which is used for this purpose.They both run alot smoother and a bit faster.My question is this....would putting Poser(4)on a large seperate partition all by itself have any advantage?(It would then have it's own swap file).

It is a good idea. Mine has 40Gb to roam.

I have a similar situation as above, lot of programs on c drive. I have a second hard drive with 3 20 gig partitions. Will poser run on a separate drive by itself without having windows on the same drive?

Yes it'll run from wherever you install it. Mine runs on my D: drive. (My install folder is already bigger than my entire C: partition.) As far as I'm aware it still uses the default swapfile on C: though. Unless one of the gurus knows different. :o).

It uses the swap file on C...? Humm. Now I need an answer to that question.

It uses the windows swapfile.

Replicant,that's what I'm trying to find out.If only one default swapfile is used, there would be no performance advantage using a seperate partition.

Poser doesn't make it's own swapfiles. It lets Windows take care of that. In Win9x versions that mains only one default swapfile is used. In Win2k or WinXP you can define multiple swapfiles on different partitions. So there you can play around with it. But I'm not sure if it will make much difference in Poser anyway. I don't think it uses the disk much anyway. Putting a swapfile on another disk is only usefull if besides the swapping the system is also doing a lot of other work on the disk. (Because in that case one disk will take care of the swapping, and the other takes care of the other work. That also explains why just having two partitions on 1 disk isn't usefull for this at all, since it is still the same disk that has to do all the work)

mjtdevries,Thanks for the help.

In Windoze 98 you can specify where you want the swapfile, & how big it is. Right click on "My Computer", click on "Properties" then click on the "Performance" tab & finally the "Virtual Memory" button. Tell windoze you want to specify your own virtual memory settings & specify where & how big the swapfile should be.

Tip passed on to me from Ken McCarthy at the Poser newsgroup is that the virtual memory/swap files works best for Poser if the min/max size is set to twice your physical memory size. This prevents your vm from becoming fragmented as well as refreshing in good order. This seems to work fine with Poser4 in Win98SE [my setup].

This is all still very fuzzy to me.Seeing how well Photoshop and Illustrator did with a swapfile away from Windows (XP),I was thinking Poser would do just as well.Today I put it to the test.I installed Poser(2 gigs. worth of files)on a seperate 10 gig partition...set the minmax size to 800mb.for that partition.The results..Poser showed no increase in performance at all! The swapfile size for my computer now shows as the combined total for both partitions. I think the two Adobe programs did well,because you assign the swapfile location from within the program itself(an option Poser does not have).Well...It was worth a try!?!?

As I said, placing a swapfile on a different harddisk only helps if the program is doing a lot of work on the harddisk AND at the same time is swapping to the disk. In that case you distribute disk usage over two disks and see a performance increase. But that doesn't apply to Poser, and therefore you won't see a performance increase. BTW I would never set the min/max size the same. There is simply no logical reason to do that. By setting the min size you can indeed prevent fragmentation of your swapfile and windows doesn't spend time changing the size of the swapfile. Therefore a good minimum size is the maximum amount of virtual memory you normally use, plus a bit extra. (25% for example). There is no harm in setting a high max size. Windows will only use it when it needs more swapspace, and when it doesn't need it anymore, it releases that diskspace again. But when your max space is not large enough, your application will crash. So I don't take a risk and set a high max setting. My max setting is 3GB. (Normal application cannot use more than 3GB, so higher then that isn't needed IMHO) BTW just placing swapfiles on a seperate partition but not on a seperate disk doesn't increase speed. (Because it is still the same harddisk that had to do the work) The only thing you can accomplish that way is to prevent fragmentation of the swapfile. (But you can also do that with a good min size)