First, apologies...I'm sure this topic has been around before, but I'd like to get some advice on my specific problems.

I've used Poser and Carrara in the past and they were my favorite combination.  They worked well together and I had no problem importing multiple figures and scenes into Carrara without any problems.

So, now we have Poser 7 and Carrara 5 (which we know have issues because the two companies won't play nice and don't care about their customers).  Add to the mix Victoria 4 (which I think is a much larger file size than V3) and I'm having big problems importing 3 or 4 figures into Carrara.  My computer slows down to a crawl, whereas before it was able to handle the load.

I have a AMD Athlon dual 64 with 2 gigs of RAM (I'm getting another gig) and a NVidia GeForce 7600 GS 512MB  And I'm running Windows XP SP2 (I tried Vista but switched back due to lack of OpenGL support)

SO....I'm open to suggestions about rendering software, hardware upgrades, or just about anything that can allow me to import multiple Poser figures without my system getting bogged down.  I don't want to use Poser as my renderer because I like the quality of renders much better with other software.

I'm also interested to hear what other people can do....how many figures can you comforably import into another rendering program and what kind of setups do you have?

Thanks for any advice!!!!