I know this has been discussed before, but I was too busy cussing P5 at the time to pay attention, and now I can't find the thread. I'm slowly deciding that P5 is a good thing after all, and trying to find out more about it and how to make it work without taking a week to render stuff... I want to love P5 as much as I love P4. Anyway, when I installed it, there was a horrible XP-type activation thingie, where I registered with CL and got a lot of random words sent back to me, at which point P5 was 'activated.' (I have NO idea how this all works, or what was the point of the random list of words). Now I see that in the patch, they've done away with the copy protection, because it was 'causing problems'. My questions: 1) does this mean that I can uninstall P5, re-install it, THEN immediately run the patches, and that I won't ever have to connect to CL to activate it? 2) is there likely to be any advantage in doing this? I seem to recall mention that the copy protection could cause problems with other non-CL programs, or something. Would I be better off without it? Sorry to be going over old ground! Morph

IIRC: 1) Yes, in theory, any new installs should just require the initial CD install plus the patch and be able to work. Hopefully, CL has changed the production code used to burn commercial CDs to one without the Interlok system and all patches applied and will sell them once the current batch is sold. 2) Probably no real advantages if you already have it installed. But initial installs or subsequent installs (ie, after a hard drive reformat) have quite a lot of benefits; some of which you mentioned.

Are you saying they have done away with that god awful XP type of activation scheme? That is good news, indeed. If so, I may actually buy it now, though I'll have to wait till all the protected ones are out of the flow. jon

yup, they've completely done away with it :)

Good things come to those who wait. :-) jon

I'll have to give some serious thought to buying it, too, now that my primary objection has been fixed...

I have a pre-ordered Poser 5 i didn't load till the latest patch. I installed it, reboot [didn't start it!!!], installed missing morphs, reboot, again no startup, installed SR2.1, reboot, started it, put in my serial and that's it. No call for authorization, nothing. Quite a relief. I wouldn't wait till they rewrite the cds, you may have a damn long wait-- after all, they are still requiring the download patch for Pro Pack. Besides if-- and it's a big if-- they ever go on to another patch that fixes at least some of the memory probs, they won't want to confuse that with a pre-patched P5. I realise this is highly unlikely [some people consider the memory probs unfixable] but I'll bet it's part of their reasoning. Emily

?? what memory problems are there still? is it just that the new renderer takes more mem? I'd expect that from a raytracer... cheers, -Josh

The beta forum says it better than I could but-- hanging on to the libraries before loosing them, changing libraries, rendering with libraries open. I had some major probs with V3, but I chopped morphs out of her and they went away. Others not so lucky, their posing is still very slow. Everything very slow. Those memory probs. There's a short list of unfixed bugs. Including some buggy rooms still. I don't really count rendering time-- I remember Bryce 3D. Emily

Well,... Hmm,... just an innocent question: Do you know that the virtual dongle is gone for good, or do you just assume that the removal is permanent? The only official statement I ever saw only said that it is removed from the latest SR because the dongle was supposed to be a source of technical trouble (that they couldn't fix otherwise), but it gave no hint about what happens if/when they find a fix for that (assuming that the statement about the reasons for the removal was correct in itself). I'm a huge fan of Tom Lehrer, so quoting one of his famous introductions in a new context: "Yeah, I know that CL introduced a virtual dongle with Poser ProPack, but we taught them a lesson and - as we all know - they never tried it again!" :-) :-) :-)

Oh good, I'll probably buy it now as well. Said it was a bad idea all along. CL could have listened to me and saved some money. :)