I don't know that I can help much here but I can give some of my observations. My scenes take from overnight to 3-4 days to render at 3000 pixels wide, often with no GI or indirect lighting. I just thought this was normal. Maybe if I paid special attention to texture map size, bump and so on I could get it down. I have also found that when the computer starts accessing the hard drive (memory swapping) the rendering drops to a crawl. With 1Gig of memory this should take a while but... I have also noticed that if C3 starts memory swapping and I stop the render , make a few changes and re render, the memory is not released and it seems to start swapping almost right away. I must exit C3 and restart to get the memory used back down. If you can't get your renders to go faster rest assured that at least one other person has the same problem! ;-) Ed