I had no idea a couple of our folks here did their cover. I've looked at it I can't say how many times and thought I saw one or two things, but never put it all together. Awesome job, simply outstanding.

I saw them this past Sunday with some friends and it was the first I'd been able to see them. I missed them last time they came around (with Tarja still), but this was a great show. There were 2, maybe 3 songs where Tarja's voice was hands down better for the song, but on the whole, great show and great time. I really like Anette and was glad to hear her voice sounds closer to studio than Tarja's (at least on the live recordings I've heard).

Too late to suggest Hongyu's in the marketplace here?

If you haven't tried it yet, try importing the broken scene. I don't know if P7 can do it, but I've seen it work for others in P6.

If you're able to import it, you should be able to save it again and be ok (assuming you turned the aforementioned option off).

I want to say you can do something similar with PhilC's program and then use Morph Manager after that to transfer the morphs, but I may be wrong. Either way, I think extreme morphs will cause some degredation. I'd love to be informed otherwise, however.

Interesting numbers. Were both using the firefly renderer? How do the images compare in quality? Lighting? Etc. Just curious.

That's...unnerving that an FX53 would see that large an increase in time. That's really a powerhouse of a system you have there.

Attached Link: http://www.dna-drivers.nl/viewforum.php?f=2

ATI has been fixing problems over the months, OpenGL included. As gps says, it looks like updating drivers worked for him, and I wouldn't be surprised if it helped you. I know it's a pretty big download for dial-up, but I think it'll be worth it. (I hope, anyway!) ATI's history of poor driver support has mostly been wiped away with the Catalyst drivers. They're pretty competent these days. If you want to try something other than the default ATI drivers, check out the provided link. They're based directly on ATI's drivers only slightly modified, usually for stability and performance (though more for gaming), and I've been using them for ages. DNA drivers are nice. :) (Another alternative is the Omega set, but I just prefer DNA.) /me returns to lurking for the next few months.

In case anyone is still paying attention to this thread, I got around to just copying Poser 5 over.

Everything is nice and snappy right now. My belief is that the registry entries (and more specifically, I'm guessing file/extension entriess) are the culprit. Considering my Poser 4 is not installed but is copied over in a similar manner, I have no Poser registry entries. Which makes me hazard a guess that people could get rid of all Poser related registry entries and see a performance increase.

I am not suggesting anyone do that. Your problem if you do, but it'd be an interesting experiment for those brave enough to see.

So, in the end, I think the blame falls on Microsoft here. Registry bloating is primarily Windows's fault for their code, though it doesn't help when every program puts in a billion entries. Then again, I may be completely off base on my guess, but my system is better for not having installed either program. Gotta love programs that work without registry entries.

stewer, I was planning on doing something like that. May do that a little later, actually. No worrying here, just curiosity. :)

Some quick thoughts to other posts, and not necessarily in the order they were posted: I do see imountsrv running now, so I obviously saw that one wrong. If it is indeed linked to the Windows installer, then no big deal. However, I don't see it on Black Viper's list, so, I'll go with what you said. Cool. Also, it's on auto, so it's not that (as you said it being on manual could be a problem), if that indeed could be a problem. However, outside of formatting and reinstalling Windows, installing Poser 5 and patching, rebooting, removing it, and rebooting, I couldn't do this test in a more controlled environment. I'll grant that there may just be some conflict somewhere between something (Windows? another program?) and Poser, and not necessarily the copy protection, but you can't ignore that the only time the symptoms are there is when Poser 5 is installed. As soon as it's removed, all symptoms vanish. That is very black and white. No other program or game has had this effect. I mentioned installing and removing Photoshop (as well as those things it leaves behind) had no effect. I've checked fonts, and there's been no new fonts installed since uh, well, when I installed Windows. I've been in font hell before, and I'm not there now. I considered the possibility that P5 just bloats the registry, but I haven't gotten around to seeing exactly how much it puts in the registry, especially since some of it can be a pain to track down. I considered running a registry cleaner as well, but I just haven't gotten that far yet. I rebooted only once because I wanted to "avoid" having interlok run, if it indeed was the case. I wanted to update Poser so that it wouldn't be there. Well, I've searched both drives and don't see the file, so that at least looks right. I've considered reinstalling, rebooting, patching and again rebooting, to see if it's any different, but I think next on the list is copying over a pre-installed copy. I'm not sure what to expect, but it will be interesting to see. Again, I don't have the answers, just saying what's happening. I'm trying to figure it out as time permits.

I can understand that you don't want to trust my memory. Perfectly understandable. So allow me to put to rest any doubts:

I just reinstalled Poser 5. I did a minimal installation, meaning just the Poser 5 content. I didn't do the runtime or anything else. I promptly installed SR4.1 (it claims to be 4, but that shouldn't matter if it the copy protection was removed in 4, or 3, whichever) without rebooting. I immediately started a trace with bootvis and rebooted.

I was greeted by 4.25 passes of the blue bar (I said green before, and I'm sorry, but I did get the colors wrong).

Now, since typing the last paragraph, I've removed P5 and run another trace, and guess what? It booted like normal. Of note: I did not run the program between installing and removing.

Comparing the traces, I can see "imountsrv.exe" being loaded when P5 was installed, along with "pmounter.exe". A google search says prmounter.exe is a Paragon Hard Disk Manager file (which I have installed), but curiously, this process is not started now that Poser 5 is removed.

Further more, imountsrv is not run now that P5 is gone. A google search turns up one item that is merely a list of processes without any description of them (you have to search for imountsrv, not imountsrv.exe). Also, standard system processes at boot start anywhere from 7 to 10 seconds faster without Poser 5 installed than with.

I'm not sure what else I can offer at this point. I know my system, and I know what I'm seeing based on logs and experience. There's definitely something going on there, but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

I'm not trying to stir any pots or start anything, but I think it's worth the time to consider my experiences and logs here. I think it's possible CL forgot to remove something. Edited: because I can't type.

Message edited on: 09/13/2004 23:55

Since people asked, no, this machine has nothing running. In fact, I have taken the time to disable everything I can that uses cpu time. Heck, check the process list at startup and you'll see 15 items. I'm very anal about this.

I didn't get into the very nitty gritty before of how I know it's Poser 5, but it's quite obvious: I didn't install anything but PS7 and P5 before I noticed an increase in boot time. Removing PS7 had no effect, but removing P5 did. I, in fact, installed an anti-virus program before removing those, and it now boots just as fast as it used to, despite there being an anti-virus prorgram installed (for the curious, I have no viruses, and had no viruses, hence why I never had any anti-virus software installed. I'm anal, I know what gets installed on my machine, and I knew I had nothing to fear, but I figured I'd cover all bases anyway. I also have it disabled. Yes, I'm confident I won't get a virus. You decide if it's arrogant or stupid. ;)).

The only thing I can figure is maybe I tried to run P5 before installing SR4, but I'm fairly positive I installed and then immediately patched. I have no desire to use P5 in its initial form, but I've been fine with it since SR3.

I can't explain why what happened, well, happened. I'm just telling you what happened.

Oh, also, if something was scanning the runtime at boot, it'd choke on my P4 runtime long before P5's. I install P5 as just the program. I don't use any of its content except the dynamic items. P4, on the other hand, has a monstrous runtime. Gah, out of hand, really.

eMachines M6805. I'm generally not an eMachines fan, but I'll admit when they have a killer laptop at a great price. It's an Athlon 64 laptop with a widescreen, Radeon 9600, etc, etc. Best Buy has them for about $1250 (after rebates) till the end of the month. If I hadn't just bought a new desktop (I was too lazy to build one...), I probably would have bought one of these.

http://www.emachines.com/products/products.html?prod=eMachines_M6805

BTW, check out some smaller name brands. Sager makes high quality laptops (in fact, Alienware slaps their name on some Sager laptops and marks the price up). I have a friend with one and he's been very happy with it.

http://www.powernotebooks.com

Gah. That's just pathetic. And to claim they're 99.9% his models? Puh-leeze!

Have you tried the dial cleaner from DAZ? I don't have a link handy, but it's on their site. It's useful for P5 since it reads all of the morphs regardless of them being injected or not, but it might also help remove some excess size from the files.

Attached Link: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

mac, have you checked out Firefox from Mozilla? It's the browser-only version of Mozilla (I have both installed right now, and Thunderbird, which is the mail-only deal), and it's pretty spiffy. On top of the usual benefits of using a non-MS browser (security, useful features, etc), it won't have Flash installed from the get go. :) Gotta love that it automatically blocks popups, can be made to not load graphics if they're coming from another site (ads, ya know), and can decide what types of scripts can run (helpful if you hate websites that resize your window as much as I do).