I am currently using a sony laptop with a i7 2.2 with nvidia g460M and 8Gb of memory and i know of the issues with V6 and M5 being hard to pose for animations and have set the subdivision settings to 0 while attempting to do animations for my charaters, however it is still almost impossible to get anything accomplished with these avatars without poser either locking up or crashing completely. This also occurs every time i try to do a preview play back with either single or skipped frames or utilizings the scrub bar.  I am assuming that it may be a RAM issue but i am not sure.  so my questions is...before i go out and purchase anouther 8GB of RAM to attempt to resolve this issue is there something else i could be doing to avoid the expensive upgrade?

Open the taskmanager, and look at your memory load before going out to buy more.

looks like i have got about 2.5 GB just running the desktop and a web browser outside of normal pc functions

That is a lot for an idling system. Time for a serious clean up first.
Or you have a zillion plug ins and or toolbars running inside your brower.
Those are the first to go.

Then open Poser, load you scene and check momory load again.