I just posted this info at Renderotica in reply to a question about Poser/Windows memory problems and also as to how to get more out of Poser in Win 95/98. Many people have problems in this area and this solution works for me so I thought it was worth sharing here as well. There are two little programs which, if used properly, will really up your poser capabilities. I run Win 98 on a PII 450 with 250 Mgs of ram and three hard drives with 80 gigs of space. So I can afford a lot of virtual memory when needs be, but Poser still drags. I used to find that with three or four morph-heavy figures, big textures, trans-mapped hair and clothes, this was the absolute limit for my computer. In a recent test I had 12 Eve figures, full of mts, all with transmapped hair plus tex/trans maps, 3000x3000 body texture maps, bump maps and lots of other bits and pieces with shadow maps set to 1024 and lots of different lights. I was able to handle this huge load because of the following two utilities. 1) AnalogX MaxMem (win 95,98,NT) www.analogx,com. I have this utility running constantly in my tray and use the "agressive" free memory setting regularly (also while running Poser) to take care of Windows memory leaks. It is absolutely great and FREE. 2) The real secret to being able to render much bigger and more memory intensive Poser scenes "Cacheman 3.80" http://www.outertech.com It is Postcardware (free but send the guy a card). This enables a whole range of Vcache size settings for Win 95 and 98. You have to play with it to find your best options. I normally use the Power user or Multimedia settings for Win 98 and blow the standard setting right up by a factor of 4 or more. For me it really works, but when not working in Poser, I reset to standard Windows 98 Vcache settings as some of these -while great for working in Poser- are not so good for other things like Internet browsing. Here is some of the blurb from the help file: "Cacheman is a utility which tweaks the disk cache settings and prevents frequent swapping of the data to disk resulting in an improved performance and stability. What's the problem with the Windows Disk Cache? VCACHE is drive cache Windows allocates that can often gobble up 25-40% of your installed memory. By default Windows places NO LIMIT on how large it can be. Wonderful.... After accessing large files, like video clips, VCACHE expands to an often huge size and then is very stingy about giving that memory back to the system. This is NOT the Windows swapfile and is NOT controllable from System/Performance/Filesystem/Troubleshooting. On machines with <128 megs VCACHE can (and often does) cause low memory crashes when using memory intensive software like Photoshop, Media Studio Pro, Premiere etc. etc. This is especially the case when you've been accessing large files or previewing your project. On machines with <64 megs it can make life intolerable. It can also cause playback problems in low memory situations. Microsoft has changed the VCACHE strategy in Windows 98. Applications are launched directly in the disk cache instead of loading them into another memory area and launching there (as Windows 95 does). This is a good improvement, but there is still no limit on how large VCACHE can be - so the 'too big disk cache' problem still remains. Cacheman has special Windows 98 support (it sets the disk cache larger compared to the Windows 95 settings). Cacheman is a graphical interface which simplifies the task of making a simple change to the [vcache] numbers in your System.ini file. The only change that's made is to the "minfilecache" and "maxfilecache" numbers. A major advantage Cacheman offers over manually changing these numbers, is that it has three user settings with "default" numbers which have proven most effective for each type of user, but Cacheman does give you slidebars to further modify those numbers, and alters the numbers as a pair, instead of blindly guessing at each of the two numbers individually." Both of these free programs (MaxMem and Cacheman) when used together with Poser have seriously increased my computer's power and the size of the Poser scenes I can handle. These work for me but may not for everyone. Give them a try and see. Two last points. 1)make sure you shut down as many non usefull running apps when using Poser(Control+Alt+Delete) as this helps with memory usage and other conflicts. 2) I have also found both of these programs very handy for helping with memory use in Rhino. Hope they work for you. Regards STORM

Thank you Storm. I've been considering doing some expensive upgrading because of the memory probs. I might try your solutions first :) Cheers, Xena

there is another posibility: in the " system.ini "of windows is a section "vcache" with "min" ana Max" where you can setup the vcachesize manually . but if you use win98 there is normally no prob with vcachesize. In the norton utilities there is a program which shows you the cachesize during other programs are running.And one can see the cachesize getting smaller the more poserfigures you load