LOL welcomesite, my sentiments exactly! Nice image OldBob its especially good for a first post. The colors are very nice. The posing is very good as well. It did seem like the bull should be a bit larger. Overall you did a fine job. P.S. you're not kin to English Bob "The Duck of Death" are you? J/K

Mjtdevries: I've got the Radeon 8500 too. Our machines seem very similar with the only major difference being the operating system. I would be very interested to see the results of your test after installing Windows XP. I timed the creating shadow map portion of the test at 5 seconds and 32 seconds to render.

This just started happening to me after I had transferred my files over from my old computer. I just keep hitting continue until the file loads. It is a nuisance, but the file will load properly. It is similar to the "This is a newer version than expected but Poser will attempt to read it anyway" experience.

I just ran the test again with my Internet Explorer open and connected to the internet. This time the result was 39 seconds. So background activities do make an impact...albeit a small one. I forgot to mention earlier that my 120 gig Maxtor is formated with only one 120 gig partition. Is it better to partition?

Mjtdevries: My Maxtor drive is not the fastest one, I think you are referring to the 7200 rpm version, mine is 5400 rpm. I am not certain of the model number because I bought an OEM drive with no paperwork. Consulting your post above (44 seconds), it would appear that maybe your hard drive configuration is slowing you down. From the tests that I have read, your IBM drive should be faster than my Maxtor 120 gig. Why don't you re-try the test using an external stop watch instead of having the task manager open? That could be the difference right there.

I decided to run Jim Burton's CPU test on my old machine, a Pentium III 850 GHZ, 512 megs of SDRAM, Windows 98 SE and a completely jam-packed Maxtor 40 gig harddrive in ATA 66 mode. 1 minute, 21 seconds or 81 seconds total. I was impressed! I am planning to reformat the drive and install Windows XP on this but not until I get everything moved over to my Athlon 1800. I will be interesting to see what the difference in render performance between Windows 98SE and XP is. What is the difference between XP's Home and Professional Editions....besides the price? Are there any benefits to performance?

I ran the CPU test from Jim Burton this morning. With my wristwatch (with stopwatch function) in my left hand and my mouse in my right hand---I clicked render. 37 Seconds. Athlon 1800+, 512 mb of DDR, and crippled with (according to Kyko..see above) Windows XP home edition. My drive is a Maxtor 120 gig formatted with FAT32, running in ATA 133 mode. I wonder if the speed increase over almost every thing else that I see posted here is due to my Abit motherboard with the new KT266A chipset?

I uninstalled Vue and then re-installed. I then applied the 4.03 patch. Opened up Vue and imported the very same PZ3 that was locking Vue up before and what do you know? It opened it and I was able to manipulate it. Everything works great now. This was a pretty complex file consisting of Vicky, Mike with the Daz hi-res textures, and Debbie's Patio prop. I rendered the scene in final mode at 1024 x 768 and it was done in about 90 seconds. Based on this, I believe there is a problem with the new patch.

Glad to hear no one else is having the problem. Maybe its a compatability issue with Windows XP. When I had Windows 98SE I never had the problem. I guess I'll revert back to 4.03 and just take a loss on the new vegetation if they don't work.

Soccer rape is considered by many to be one of the great classics! ROTFLMAO

After getting the system up and running, I went to the Windows Update site and was directed to download (which I did) a new driver for the Athlon processor. That probably means that yes there was a bug, and now it is fixed. So far so good. The one irritant that I experienced was Microsoft's flagrant attempt to shove it's Instant Messenger Service (I have absolutely no use for these types of programs)down my throat. They don't make it easy to get rid of but I was persistant and it has been succesfully removed from my taskbar. Another question: Where is the system configuration utility hiding? Were too many people using it to disable Instant Messenger and so it was removed? All in all though, it was the easiest Windows upgrade that I have done so far.

I upgraded this afternoon. It took a little over an hour to get everything configured. I needed new drivers for my video card, sound card and modem. Fortunately I had downloaded them the night before and had them ready. My first test was to bring Vicky2 and Mike2 with the hi-res Daz textures and bumps into a scene with Magnet's Emmanuelle with bumps and Asia again with full resolution textures and bumps. It rendered it all in about 30 seconds. I repeated the process 3 times with the same results. Considering that the machine would lock up after about 3 renders with just the Vicky2 texture, I would say the operation was a success. Now if I could just get High Heat Baseball 2002 to work.....

I have downloaded all of the newest XP drivers for my Radeon 8500, Soundblaster Audigy, Wacom Intuos etc. There may be no need to upgrade the Roxio EZ-CD Creator because there is supposed to be built-in burner support for CD burning in XP itself. I will be installing this afternoon. Thanks for all of the help.

No Singing!!! At least not until I get everything up and running.