Upgrade hurdles

[wylackii]

I am upgrading my PC, I ran W7 RC and every program ran fine except 3DS Max 4. It had to do with the Macrovision protection. Only a European hack update for vista. My choices are run xp and W7 together or run xp in a VM.
Will running in a VM decrease performane? My current 3D scenes use a lot of RAM and I would like to use all of it but I might have to get XP 64-bit and hope it is compatible with the Macrovision protection.
Any thougths? Upgrading to Max 5 is a possibility but I would prefer the older version since I would have to upgrade all the plugins I purchased for it.

[Force Flow]

Originally Posted by wylackii Will running in a VM decrease performane?

In a word, yes.



If you're planning on moving forward with your win7 upgrade, you might want to think about either a secondary PC (if you have the hardware available), or biting the bullet and upgrading 3ds Max. The current version is 12 (aka 2010), from what I can tell, and version 4 is approaching 10 years old.

It's possible that some of the plugins you have for version 4 may have been included as actual features in later versions or rendered them unnecessary altogether.

[wylackii]

I took the time to check them out and some aren't included, like my Swift 3D exporter. Or at least I think. The product still meets my needs and will install to XP 32 but I haven't tried 64 yet. It would be cheaper to buy XP 64 and test it than to upgrade my plugins.
Then again I am thinking of switching to Blender. My needs are as high as they used to be.
So we will find out if Macrovision will work with XP 64. I think I willl have a dual system but some of my scenes have DEM in them and use 2 GB of RAM before anything else is added.
One thing I didn't think of was doing a minimal install and setting up my work horse PCs as network render clients.
In any case, it will be better than running it on my dual proc Pentium3 machine/quadro 3000.

[Force Flow]

You'll probably face problems with XP 64. It isn't/wasn't widely supported. That goes double for your older version of 3ds max, since it was produced way before XP 64 was even available.

[glc]

If you want to upgrade to a 64 bit OS, don't even bother with XP or Vista. Go with Win 7 or some flavor of Linux. If you don't want to upgrade your software, stick with XP 32 if you already have it. Put 4 gigs of ram in it and take the 3.25 or so gigs that it will see.

[wylackii]

Sounds good. I think I will load my machine with more RAM + W7 64 and run a virtual XP 32 just for that program. I am worried that running it like that will decrease the perfomance enough but I am planning on building my machine on 32nm Intel procs coming out soon (I hope) according to my magazine.
I definitely want to keep the software since I put a lot of time and money into it and I don't need to upgrade even for the improvements I have read about in the latests releases since I do this for fun now. If I decide to do this professionally I will definitely upgrade my software.