The card will not consume 400watts.... It actually only consumes 39watts max and around 10 watts idle....

The 400watt your reading is the minimum system requirements for the entire system (i.e you ideally want at least a 400watt power supply in your computer)...

The reason its a higher requirement is because its a newer card and its expected to be in a newer system with more power demanding hardware... Though saying that i ran a PSU calculator test and interestingly when i set the calculator to have roughly the same card as the one your thinking of getting the PSU requirements came back lower than your old card... in short your new card is more power efficient ;)

heres the link to the PSU calculator i used incase you want to see for yourself ;)
www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Like others have said join a club or something or get a hobby which involves socialising.... and when talking to people the most important thing is to relax and be yourself !!!

As for talking to the "ear phone" people, avoid these people, they wear ear phones for a reason, they DON'T want to talk to you.... thats why they dont smile back at you !

Also you mentioned talking to "young" people, how young are we talking ? early 20's ? if so theres your problem, they see you as an old fart and cant be bothered talking to someone in their early thirties.. if i was back in my early twenties and some strange guy in his thirties walked up to me and started talking to me for no reason i would be like "WTF why the hell is this creepy gimp talking to me !!!", and if your talking to girls in their early twenties your wasting your time unless you are an extremely good looking guy or ugly and have a lot of money.....

IF your main agenda for talking to people is just for potential dating just join a dating website, stick your pic on it all your likes dislikes and such and say something like your a shy but nice guy who is genuinely looking for friendship or more !  Im sure someone will bite (they most likely wont be a twentysomething hot chick, more than likely a woman in her thirties)

heres a silly responce to the whole "what if daz stops supporting poser thing".... What if renderosity itself creates its own figure sets ?

With the amount of profit that renderosity makes surely it could afford to hire some 3d modelers and artists with the skills to create a proffessional 3D person(s) series... If they made decent easy to work with models and had the support of most of the popular poser vendors renderosity could have a real money maker....

Just undercut daz and have the bulk of the vendors releasing renderosity 3d figure exclusives... hell renderosity could even give vendors nice "exclusive" profit shares just for the initial support, with the hint of higher profits im sure most vendors would fall in line... with the size of renderosity and the support of the community im sure it could easily do something like this...

**Tashar59, all motherboards with PCI-E slots (or agp if your going way back) can take any graphics card be it Nvidia or ATI...  when you start talking about SLI or Crossfire then it does start to get motherboard specific... some motherboards have Crossfire compatibilty, some dont. Some boards have SLI compatiblity, some dont. Some motherboards can support both techs....   Its only if your going to have 2 GFX cards then you have to start looking at your motherboard specs.

Anyways 2 cards are pointless, usually you never get the full power out of the second card, and its always better to have a single more powerfull card than 2 cheaper ones (unless you can find the 2 cheaper cards for a real steal !)

I hope this clears up any confusion you have ;)
**

If all your poser files are running on your new 1TB drive and its running slow it could be because its an ECO friendly "Green" drive.... these drives are usually slow RPM drives which are only intended for movie/image/music storage, not as a main drive that intensive programs run off of.

If you want faster file access buy a proper non "eco" harddrive with decent  RPM speeds.....

pjz99 i agree with everything you have posted in here...

And to add my own 2cents, i think the mods here are very nice people.. some of the abuse and the lack of respect that can be shown to them amazes me....  Seriously the way they are spoken to sometimes makes me want to throttle certain people.... :|

I almost wish the mods here got a bit tougher and didnt take the crap that people throw their ways...

Renderosity mods i take my hat off to ya !!!! ;)

I would say install DivX or Xvid codecs (they can be found easily with a google search), And use www.virtualdub.org to process your raw avi into one of the compressed formats !

Thats about the best way !

when poser starts up it tries to load up the default scene, which should load up the el'standard poser man which willl require the location of the default poser people locations... a way around that is to setup a new blank poser startup scene..

Do the following...

load up poser.... it will probably ask for the locations of files... do this...
Once poser is completely loaded, delete the poser guy in the preview window... now go to the "edit" drop down menu and click on "general preferences" a new window should appear, in the "launch behavior" part of the window select "Launch to prefered state" then click on the "set prefered state" button, this will set poser to load up a blank scene on startup and avoid any error messages that will be encountered....

also i should say that you can also create a "libraries" folder in the default install runtime and that should also aid in avoiding any error messages that occurr !

you are right, you can move anything thing thats in the root of the runtime directory (except anything thats in the python directory) and as long as you set the external runtime directory in poser it should reconise the files...

I would say the safe directories to move are the following geomitries,  libraries, Lipsync, Textures...

Though saying that, even if you move something poser needs and poser cant find the new file location the program will ask you to manually find the file... if that happens, you just take the file name posers looking for and do a manual search in the alternate external drive file structure

William i 100% agree with you.... and i have been thinking the exact same thing for a while now....

I should also add one observation i have noticed, a lot of the textures on new 3d mesh releases are pretty basic and almost crappy looking... almost makes me think its done on purpose to get people to buy the "hyper attitude mk X ultra lethal pathogen turbo edition" texture add on packs !!! :|

hhmmm, sounds interesting thefixer.....

where abouts in the u.k are you thinking of doing this meeting ?

I use V4 almost exclusively, for exactly the same reasons as MistyLaraPrincess...   Most V4 clothes come with a good chunk of Morphs++ support while V3 clothes usually dont have much morph support... V4 makes getting the clothes to fit a hell of a lot easier and no need to use wardrobe wizard to get clothes to fit !!!! :D

best wishes and all the luck in the world to you !!!!

I really hope everything goes well for you !!!

yup,

still the same !!!! :|

Am i allowed to show the shader settings of a store bought character ?

Just thought i'd ask since i dont want to post it then have someone saying "your revealing my secrets" ;)

I turned off texture filtering on everything in the scene, also theres not really much hard drive activity when the cpu droppage happens, when loading everything and rendering the light shadowmaps the drives are at over 100mb per second in transfer rates then when it comes to actuall rendering the drive I/O is sitting at under 10mbps :|

I installed the latest bios, and still no luck ! :|

Hell last night i even tried having my poser installs on one drive, the runtimes on another and the windows page file on another drive so there should be no bottleneck with data transfer on a single drive..... still no joy !!! :|