I have a 1.4Ghz with 1gig of ram and when I play a poser animation it plays slow (seems to be about 60%-70% slow)- It makes it hard to get timing right- I have selected "Skip Frames" but it still plays slow (of course it plays even slower when I dont select skip frames)- I have tried doing just a wired mesh and disabling shadows and DOF but it doesnt help. Any ideas on how to be able to play the animations at full speed, or is this a common issue with poser? Thanks so much in advance!!

Poser has no hardware acceleration, so all of the calculations are done with the processor. Even on a powerful rig, it can still bog down if the scene is sufficiently complex (multiple Millennium figures, for instance).

Other than upgrading to a faster processor, there are two tricks you can try:

1. Turn on Fast Tracking (SHIFT-CTRL-X). This causes Poser to reduce the complexity of the scene during movement in Preview mode (your figures will look boxy). It won't affect the actual render. You can switch back to Full Tracking (SHIFT-CTRL-C) when you need to see precisely what's going on.

2. Make some elements of your scene invisible. Select a figure, pull up the Properties panel (CTRL-I), and disable the Visible option, or use Hide Figure (CTRL-H). The fewer items you have visible, the less work you're giving the processor. You can turn everything back on at once using the Show All Figures command on the Figure menu.

I hope this helps!