I'm running the demos and finding my CPU's running at 58-88% (even 98% at times) for just this software and the resulting displays freeze up momentarily a couple of times a minute much of the time, along with jerky movement for perhaps 1/4 to 1/3rd of the time. Choice of display size does not seem to affect this symptom. And perhaps a related issue: despite setting the location as the 'right' and transparency at say, 30%, often as not they're displaying in the center and the transparency is erratic (sometimes they're fully opaque).

Are the "system requirements" so much more than an AMD 3700 [2.2GHz] with 1.0GB RAM, usually 800x600 screen resolution, but can manage as needed (eg. to close out this software's settings window), 1024x768, running on Windows XP? What are the optimal system requirements for the current version of VirtuaGirl? Is there an earlier, less CPU intensive version available that will run the cards more smoothly and effectively?

Hello @v6546 and welcome, i imagine now a Quad processor are prefered for use the program in the good condition, 2 GIGA ram minimum, best 4 GIGA ram. a good graphic card 1600x900 to 1920x1080

my config :
proc - Q6600 2.40Ghz
4 Go ram
Graphic card NVIDIA Geforce 8600 GTS - 500 Mega ram

with my laptop Duo processor.

always with my laptop DUO Pros, if i desactive in VG - Settings - Advanced - Allow streaming of clips, i win a little speed but i see UC 100 several time.

i forget : system XP SP2 are the minimum.

So the issue here is that your computer is borderline too slow to run VGHD.

However you look at it, you are attempting to process and throw around HD video. These are big and if you have to compress on the fly to lower resolution that is just more work.

There is ample room for specultion on what may help. Older versions of the program are both likely to not play current animations and have bugs that have been fixed. Thus probably not a good idea.

Unfortunately most of the potential solutions are going to be hardware based.
A better graphics card is going to enable more (most/all) of the work to be offloaded from the CPU. This frees the CPU to load the data into memory.
Which brings us to memory... more memory is not going to *****. 2G and turning off paging would help alot, it removes all the unnecessary write and read to disk, which slows the whole system down.

If you do not want to spend money, then make sure you are on the latest graphics card firmware and drivers. These can improve significantly during the life of the graphics card.
You could try turning off paging. You system should perform faster... until it hits the memory ceiling... but then all hell will break loose. You probably won't see the same issue twice. With 1G of memory, you should have enough for the OS, but not alot else. So you probably will not have problems booting... just issues when starting apps. If you have too may items start at boot... you may not be able to boot... which will cause problems reverting to previous setup.
So the final option is find all those unwanted systray and load at boot applications that you rarely use and remove them (at least from running and starting at boot.... just start them when needed). Overall OS runs better... running apps run better... but app startup for the first takes a performance hit.

Just my thoughts google any that you fancy trying and see what the wide lot use.

Thank you for your replies. Here's my PC's usage graph. For initial load up (1), the settings page clearly swamps my PC (perhaps I'll figure out how to avoid the settings page loading, because it's also incredibly awkward to closeout unless I've remembered to increase my screen resolution first), and (2) the demo is being managed but at times during this example is hitting 88% CPU usage (nothing else is running).

I'm very dubious about more memory being a solution and I do think the problem is mostly the processor's not up to the task. Windows XP (thankfully still being supported for some time to come) uses minimal RAM (relative to Windows Vista, 7, 8, etc.). And, I've already doubled my PC's initial 500MB RAM to 1 GB RAM (so, the O/S ought not be consuming more than 1/3rd of my memory in the worse case scenario imo).

I'm no tech geek (eg. for sure I'd not try 'turning paging off'), but if I understand the issues, I think you can see by the screenprint and RAM "available" and "system cache" that I've a fair bit of RAM that's in reserve. I agree that a new graphics card should help, perhaps quite a lot (by unburdening my CPU and less critically, freeing up some RAM).