Well, I've committed myself to ordering a new machine now and have gone down the route of a single powerful box rather than a render farm (mainly because of other applications I'll want to run apart from Vue and for space considerations). The new box will be powered by dual core 3.2 GHz Xeon processor(s) so hopefully that will help Vue. I like the notion of a Hermit Crab upgrade but I've yet to decide whether I can utilise my old lap top in any secondary capacity. It'll be way underpowered compared with the new rig. Thanks for all the advice and an interesting discussion. My new box should arrive in the next couple of weeks and then I'll do as wabe suggests and download the Vue demo, just about in time for my birthday :-) Very much looking forward to playing with Vue...