setting aside all the PC vs. Mac arguments, the answer is... it used to be the case, but I dunno about now. With a G4 or G5 Mac and Poser 5, you could up the bucket size on a render and speed the times up considerably. I saw at least a 50-60% faster render speed in Poser 5 when I upped the bucket size on my dual G5 (1.8GHz machine) to 256 from its defaults, but IIRC (not 100% sure), I believe that PC's were not able to make as good of a use of that aspect. w/ Poser 6, bucket size broke for some reason, but I still had the advantage (At least w/ a dual-proc Mac) of running a render in Poser, while at the same time surfing the web, doing practically anything else, up to and including program compiles, without bogging down the machine too much. Dual-proc (SMP) PC's could prolly also reap the same benefits, but SMP systems were kinda rare in the PC world until hyperthreading came out. Nowadays the hardware will be a lot more similar, so it comes down to OS efficiency and how much 'oomph' your hardware has. For example, a new top-end Mac (two Core Duos) w/ P7 would have an effective 4 processor pool, allowing max threads (how many is that in P7?) to chew on a render at once. A Mac Mini OTOH only has a single Core Duo, so you only get maybe 2-4 w/o slowing down the machine, depending. PC's would be very similar. a Pentium 4m w/ no hyperthreading would be very limited, while a top-end PC (assuming you don't have a multi-CPU motherboard) gives you a top-end Intel Core Duo, or whatever AMD makes to match that. (To be really obscene, if I turned loose one of my typical work servers on it --a pair of 3GHz Dual-Core Xeons w/ 16GB of DDR2 RAM and SAS hard drives-- I'd barely have time to lift my finger from the mouse key after clicking "render" before it was done.) As for running processes? Hard to tell. OSX has literally dozens running as mentioned, but Windows will hide a very large share of theirs from view by the user (which is why rootkits are so effective in Windows). Memory is handled very differently by the two OS types. OSX does on-the-fly defrag while Windows largely does not... and disk fragmentation can make a difference in render times since Poser reaches for and reads things like texture files, bump/displacement maps, and etc during a render. Finally, Registry integrity/corruption can play a small but notable part in how well Windows will perform a render. Then, there's Vista... a near-unknown because most proggies aren't written for it yet, especially its use of 64-bit extensions (as opposed to written for a generic Win32 API). So the answer today is.... "Maybe". /P