I've found the best way to pickup something is to actually do it while I'm reading. Too often you do not see pictures in the manual to illustrate a point, command, etc. Too often the writer is not actually capable of providing a good written description. In fact it appears many manuals are written by people who are indeed not using the program when they are writing about it. Perhaps that explains why so many manuals are useless. You wouldn't find so many mistakes if the author was actually "writing and doing" at the same time. A good tutorial author will do just that. If you use an "on-screen" manual, you have a couple choices. You can shrink each screen so you can see both at the same time. Or you can click back and forth between the manual and the program. I don't like either of those choices. Yes, that is a personal preference.

Thanks again for all the info. I may just have to move out on my own, so I have the room, and then have my computer shipped down here. I definitely want a CD burner because I want to make CD's of all my Poser stuff, and I want to make "demo cd's" showing off my talents to potential customers.

If you know what P3DO does, why do you recommend against using it? One good idea is to minimize the total number of applications in your "toolkit," especially if one program serves many purposes! Double LOL

Hey, PBooost allows you to create banks so you can overcome the problem that inspires folks to resort to moving Pose files to the Camera library. P3DO Explorer is a great all-around tool. One of its "modules" is Pattern Renamer that will do the job.

I make CD's of all the stuff I buy or download. I usually redo things so you can pop the cd in the drive, and see a web page illustrating the contents. Then you can click on the thumbnails to install the items.

My understanding about Poser 5 was that Curious Labs was going to take the time to finally get it right. That meant doing the program from scratch, rather than trying to fix someone else's mistakes or fixes. That meant totally rewriting the manual to make it worth something. Instead we have Poser 5 with agressive copy protection that was suddenly dropped with no real explanation. (Was the copy protection causing instability in Poser 5?). We got Poser 5 which may finally be "right" several months after the program was released in the PC version. We get a printed manual that is no better than the Poser 4 manual. I prefer printed manuals to Adobe Acrobat manuals. I like to sit the book down on the desk, read and do something. I can't read a manual on screen and use the program at the same time.

It's not a good idea for people to release packages that have the MAT Poses in the Camera library. That should be something you choose to do. But even then, there is no longer a need to do that when you have PBooost for Poser 4 (and soon for Poser 5), and Poser 5 has sub directory capabilities. They work like a champ. If you need to rename large amounts of files, get P3DO Explorer, and the Pattern Renamer plugin. You just type in the extension you want changed, and the new extension, and away you go!

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. One concern I had about a laptop was screen resolution. Poser 5 can be really cluttered until you can get the better screen resolutions. I was running somewhere around 1280x (something) on my desktop. Now I'm about ready to see about taking some classes or courses to get certified in either the "techie" side of PC's (such as Administering Windows XP and Windows 2000) or the more creative side, such as learning Dreamweaver MX, Java, PhotoShop, etc and doing web sites. A laptop (notebook, whatever) would be of a great help in the academic situation. I am sticking with the PC platform since all my software and hardware is PC stuff. Oh, and my copy of Poser 5 is for the PC too!!!

Thanks for the feedback. I'm actually leaning toward either a Pentium 4 or AMD's equivalent, 512MB of RAM and at least a 40 GB hard drive. Here's a dumb question for you: Do most laptops come with a modem, networking cards and USB Ports? I was thinking it'd be nice to hook up an external USB or firewire drive to increase storage capacity. I'd surely want to have a CD/RW as well. Right now it's "research time" since I need to get a job, a place of my own, and a computer.

If you have Poser 5, you have no need to put your poses in any other library. In fact, it's a collosal pain in the rear to put your Poses in any other library. You can use subfolders in Poser 5. That helps you better organize your stuff. I use a good file manager program to do that work. You can also create external runtime folders and link to them from Poser 5. And eventually Hogwarden will release a Poser 5 version of PBooost. You'll be in seventh heaven then.

Steve, you've shown some really great stuff in the past few months. PWFW is definitely on my "to buy" list as soon as finances permit.

The Poser 5 manual is just plain useless or unreliable. I found so many mistakes that I gave up on it.

Here's a wild guess. Is there are readme file that would tell you where the geometry file belongs? If so, make a folder in geometries, with the name exactly as described in the readme file. Do NOT translate to German. That is my last, best, most hopeful suggestion for you. I'm sadly out of my league here.

OH! I think you have the key to the problem there! As you know, some folders are named differently in German. You might not be able to easily figure how to fix this particular problem. I'm in the US, so I'm not able to help at all. Best of luck.

I hate to say it but I'm sick of all those reposts as well. It is enough to make me avoid anything btsculptor offers, including Marketplace items. You can't discount our opinions based on whether or not you think we give something away. Did you ever think that some of us stopped giving things away for various reasons? Besides, there are many different ways of "serving the Poser community," other than free stuff. I guess I can understand btsculptor's heated response, but it really didn't serve him at all in my not so humble opinion. But then I've been increasingly disillusioned with the attitudes of many in the Poser community over the past few months.