Sorry to skew this thread a bit, but... Katherine, There's a new post (poser g5 optimized by Ede) that seems to indicate what I'd suspected for some time, which is that the Mac version of Poser 5 is not plagued with anywhere near as many problems as the Windows version. The source of course being the Mac to Windows conversion code that was written so very, very long ago. Any chance that THIS could be rewritten before anything else, so we can get responsiveness, speed, and many memory leaks, "file locks" under XP etc., fixed? All these new redesigns for the upper 2 stories of the Poser House are great of course, but if the foundation is crumbling because it's not to current (Windows) spec., then the result remains all too predictable.

maclean, I'm with you on the distraction aspect. Another trick with ZoneAlarm is to stop the Z|A logo flickering on/off on its icon. Edit the Registry, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Zone Labs > ZoneAlarm and then set Showlogo REG_DWORD to 0 (zero). Then all you see is the useful red/green meter all the time. BTW, said WebWasher lets you limit GIF animations to 3, 1, or even 0, cycles before it freezes it. lucstef, That's what I used to do before I got WebWasher - use a hosts file. But putting equivalent list in WebWasher (see the second link I gave for how-to) means that you browser doesn't even go near those sites - it can't. So not only do you not see the banners, those sites aren't tracking you either.. And it will display a white space of the right size, or a transparent image or whatever you create.

Go to Seimens site www.webwasher.com and download WebWasher Classic (lower right corner of page). It's free for personal use. It's a proxy that sits bewteen your browser and the Internet. You can then prevent pop-ups, scripts, webbots, calls to harvester companies, etc, etc. And you can easily exempt those few sites that need these often-abused features by url. Will work with any browser that you have. It actually extracts the code from the incoming HTML, so in many cases will speed up page loading by skipping all the callbacks to the website's ad sites. For an in-depth look at how to configure it to be even more restrictive as to what it let's in see http://www.pacificnet.net/~bbruce/workshop.htm. Be safe, get a prophylatic - esp. if you use IE!

"I wonder what p6 will be like I can't think too much of what they could possibly add to the software" Mesh Magic, Why more bugs of course! ;-) Sorry couldn't resist.

Nah. Can't help you with the last request! 'Cos I don't use Poser 5!!! :-O I was in at initial release stage, and was active through the public "beta". But as several things got skipped during that, and then 2.1 came out which was not quite the same as the last of the pre-2.1 "betas", I kinda lost interest. It was too slow on my system, and by the time I'd heard of the CP removal - which fixed the too slow on my system - I'd already purchased PP... Will probably give it another spin when SR4 comes out, just in case... But after 18 months I long since gave up expecting much from them. I've made a career out of testing software, and have killed many products at Alpha and/or Beta stage - and paid the ultimate coproate penalty at times - for programs which were in far, far better shape than Loser 5 is in even at SR3! And yeah, I've worked for companies where we were forced to ship something too early due to monetary issues or risk folding, a la CL, but we were doing fornightly (every 2 weeks) releases therafter until it was working... 18x7 days for everyone, some longer.

Sandoppe, I was certainly not trying to disuade anyone from buying ;-) But it is getting had to figure out a system that meets all your requirements these days. The "smaller dials" was not a good definition. What I've done is hidden the dials - totally - and put them over the parameter name. So everything works exactly as before, and the text, etc is still the same size (I understand the eye sight issue ;-) just that each entry now takes up a single line of info, rather than 2 lines as before. So it's not harder to see, it's easier! IMHO anyway. And you can see just about twice as many parameters at the same time over what you could before. Picture on PoserPros. Hint, while you can still operate the Parameter Names the same way you operated the dials (sliding over them left-right with the mouse), Poser has always supported up-down mouse movement of the dials too. This seems all the more natural without the dial image there, and gives your stressed carpels a change if nothing else.

Bummer on the HTT stuff. Means - as I feared - that the Poser (3, 4, 5) API interface is so old, that XP can't manage it properly in an HTT environment. My hunch is the Windows API interface for Poser was essentially developed when Poser first was ported from Mac to PC, and has essentially remainded unchanged since then. I assume that was for Windows 95, but I guess it could have been Windows 3.1... "Parasite" was just a play on "Content Paradise" - as it didn't seem to offer a paradise to me, it just robbed compute cycles when using the Parameter Dial window. And as it turned out also during load - at least for those of us loading at 32-bit ;-) I'm guessing that you also have ATA drives? That should theorectically speed up very large load times (like Poser) because it doesn't have to share the PCI bus with all the other traffic.

Sandoppe, Your welcome! Did your parameter dals become more responsive too? Less overshoot, etc.? 2 other small improvements - they just save operator time - are the smaller folder images in Parameter Dial window (reduces scrolling), and the smaller Dial adjustment panels (see more per scroll). Both over on Poser Pros - the latter is a Sticky on Poser 5 forum. (I did the smaller parameter dials just 'cos I suggested it during the Poser 5 public "beta" and was told by CL that it couldn't be done . If you've use After Affects or Photoshop CS you'll recongnize the concept.)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1403770

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html#1

Removing Content Parasite helps with Poser load times (all), and with responsiveness of Parameter Dials esp. on some instances of Poser 5. (Save the old unedited file though, you may need to install SR4, or better just comment out the necessary lines.)

Correct Reference helps with load times of products with incorrect texture filenames (even if Poser can find them without asking you to).

Only help with rendering times is a minimum memory size (which depends on your scene complexity), raw CPU power, and/or by playing with the FireFly parameters. Check link above for info on the latter. (For the CPU/memory discussions, see http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1418149 and follow the 3 links provided there.)

Are you sure that Poser is actually running slower with HT on than off - measured on wall clock time? Ignore the 50% cpu figure. Intel is fooling XP into beliving that there are 2 processors, and as Poser is still stuck in a Windows 95 API timewarp it can't possibly use 2 processors, so XP reports 1 CPU, i.e. half your PC, underutilized. If it does run slower in HT mode, then by how much? The difference if small it's the overhead of Intel's HT, but I'd be surprised if it's really that large. Only other thing that could be the cause is those very old API calls in Poser (i.e. that it's not really a Win2K/XP product). To speed up rendering in Firefly play with the bucket size. In terms of actually trying to speed up Slowser 5 outside of Rendering time (assuming that your at SP3), consider removing Content Parasite if you've not already. How much speed up you get varies (not sure why, but related to some or all of: how old your P5 is, how you applied patches, whether you were in CL public "beta", whether IE is your default browser, what prophylatic aids you have implemented on your system.) Instructions over on PoserPros - the Sticky under Poser 5 Tips & Tricks is easiest place to find it. CorrectReference will speed up load time of >50% of the products out there, because all versions of Poser go off on a walk through your entire Runtime everytime they hit a sub-optimal texture reference, even if it's the same reference re-occurring, e.g. eye textures.

And if you put in Face you'll get the warning that some elements do not apply to this figure. It'll still load OK though, you'll just be bothered by the bell and having to click OK. Might be time to PBooost...

No, I meant "contravention, n. Infringement (in ~ of, violation)." The Concise Oxford Dictionart, Fifth Ed. But I would have ridden too close to a contravention of the TOS myself if I had used a word whose stem was from 'violate', no? ;-) Picking nits? Perhaps, but the increasing number of double standards here were getting to me, especially after another barrage of spam emails courtesy of Renderosity. But I've said my piece here.

You mean it's not meant to be a link to e-Frontier Curious Labs parent company?

P5 is stable as of SR3. Or, more precisely, it is as stable as ProPack, or Poser 4, and I'll daresay moreso.

However P5 does everything at a much higher default/minimum memory footprint. And given that Poser has an excessive memory use, this means that for exactly the same scene, Poser 5 is already much further up the lack-of-memory induced instability curve.

All three versions have the same ongoing issue: if the file reference in the (typically) 3rd party content is wrong, Poser will "hang" while it searches. Slowly. This is a big annoyance, but one that's been around forever. (it's also often called a memory leak, but this is not a leak. Nor is it a logic loop. It's just looking until it gets to the end of the runtime, and then it waits. It eats ram because it stores the info of where its been. Not a leak. Also not poser's fault, although it would be better if it worked differently.)(much better)(Tons better)

Hmm, the invalid file reference and memory leak - or rather leaks - are very different things. Poser 5 has them both, in fact it has all those of Poser 4 plus a few more. The term memory leak referes to a program requesting additional memory allocation from the system, using it, finishing with it (i.e. writing it off witin the program), but forgetting to tell the system, to return it when it's done with it, so it is never recovered (garbage collected) for reuse, by the application or system - until the task ends. Poser 5 adds a monsterous new memory leak of ~4MB per render!

The "hang" following a file reference problem is twofold. It searches the entire Runtime for the missing texture, meaning every single directory, including those that have no right to ever hold a texture. And this means that the textures folder isn't even visited until a huge number of other folders have been pointlesly scanned. But wait, that would just make it slow not fatal, however as Poser (4, PP & 5) open each folder to search the filenames, it conveniently skips the required process of closing them behind it (unless it finds the texture in that one ;-). So the reason it sometimes hangs up indefinitely and sometimes eventually returns to respond to the user, depends entirely on how overstressed the memory footprint was before this texture search cum "let's see how many folders I can open", process started. If you're lucky Poser can survive it, otherwise it'll drive the OS's memory management one huge step closer to an irreversible end (a reason that Poser appears more stable on NT-based OS's - the memory management threshold is higher).