Ahhhh...there it is...

512MB RAM...

There is your biggest roadblock. Plus, with a bucket size that small, you are looking at a final render done by Wednesday ;-)

Is there a hard drive light on the laptop? If so, is it blinking a lot? Without a gig of RAM you are probably looking at a lot of disk I/O. And with such a small bucket, you are looking at a significant amount of render time once it begins rendering.

You seem to have quite a bit of textures in the scene too. That's going to hurt.

You may want to think about defining your swap file for windows if you want to use the laptop for your renders. I just did that last week, and it has made a pretty good difference. Once you manually set the size, it cuts down on disk framentation, which helps speed up swap file operations.

On windows 2000, right click on My Computer, choose Properties, click the Advanced tab. You should see a button labelled Performance Options, click that. You will see a section that says Swap File, with a change button. Click that. You will see fields for an initial size, and a max size. Make them the same number. There should be a recomended amount on this screen. You can use that under most circumstances. What you want is one and a half times your RAM (~768MB) Make sure you click Set, then OK.

Under most conditions, it is advised to let Windows handle a swap file on its own. However, since you are probably doing a lot of read/writes, you should try to constrain the places where windows can write to. Important: Defrag your disk before doing this! Also, once you do it, try to defrag on a normal basis, maybe once every couple of weeks. This helps more than you realize.

Sorry to hear you are having such difficulty, but until EF makes some improvements to Poser's memory management, we are all stuck in slow rendersville.

Hope this helps!