Thanks again to all. LOL, TJohn, you're right. I'm rendering the challenge image (by the way, praying that it will finish before midnight to post it regularly) and had to turn it down to 800x600 and 36rpp because... oh, well, I got so carried off by all this speed (test renders last 10 minutes! Awesome! Geeeeeeee!) that I cranked in it almost everything, from DOF to SoftShadows to Volumetrics... hehehe, so my estimated render time at 1024 was more or less in the values I had with the old PII... As for the Bryce running issue, I can't use the PC for Bryce only, because I have to do my job on it also. But the tips on screen savers and standby were great, I will take advantage of the XP possibility to have different accounts with different settings and I'll create one optimized just for Bryce renders. Cheers, Stefano