i d/lded apo a few weeks back, and put it on a 40 gig hd that i mostly use for storage. the drive is not even a year old. after a few days, i noticed my computer was running slowly, so, i uninstalled it....did scandisk, repaired errors, etc. all was fine for about 10 days, but i installed it again, and, forgot and left it running on the machine while i went to work. well, i came home, restarted and got the s m a r t bad drive message. i took it out, and, as i go through scan disk again am finding several megabites of bad data that was not there before. has anyone else had this experience? or, is it safe to reinstall it on my other hd, and, just go figger that my storage drive is dying on its own? i do enjoy apo, alot.

I have Apophysis installed on 3 machines - no problems whatsoever here... maybe your storage drive is going bad? You could try doing an fdisk to totally delete and repartition that drive - then format it fresh, and see what happens after a week or so with nothing on it (run a scandisk on it after a week to see if there are any bad sectors found) Right now, I'd be looking to backup all the data on that drive that you can - just in case it is faulty. T.

Right now, I'd be looking to backup all the data on that drive that you can - just in case it is faulty. yup, that's how i've been spending my spare time. some of the stuff i can just toss, but going through all the files is time consuming. i was really enjoying apo, and, could see using it for making textures for some of my critters....i am working on a pair of swans where i use some fractals for the feather textures and i love the way they are coming out, even though each material zone is running into about 800 layers each...lol...my other time consuming issue.

yes, i have problems with apo too, my computer gets often stuck or very very slow when i use it. have to restart the computer . i thought it was me, being not very good with computers..

Flame fractals are very RAM intensive when calculating. The more iterations, the deeper zooms, lots of fine lines, larger sized images, will all make your machine work harder. Sometimes it will try to take over every byte and it will stall everything else that you are trying to do. This will happen both when you are working on the image and when you render it to disk.

Sometimes...and only on occasion...if you set up an image, then close the program and reopen it, it will calculate the render to disk faster than if you just go from designing the image to rendering it.

Hope that helps.

Message edited on: 05/04/2005 21:19

I recently had to replace my 80 GB drive due to the intense use with APO. If the drive is even the least bit shakey, this program will bring it out. Since replacing the drive, I have had no more problems. Bunny