I was severely limited until recently.

I was using Poser on a laptop (1.8 gig Pentium III processor, 512mb of DDR ram, and a 40 gig hard drive).  I could manage so-so for what I was using poser for, but sometimes it took hours to do a simple 1 figure render without a background. I could do minimum raytracing...3 or less, but nothing large.

Then that laptop broke down and I was back on my 6 year old desktop that only had a 1 gig process with 384mb of SDRam.  Now that was a PITA!  I discovered that I couldn't use raytraying. That I had to go and resize all of my textures to no larger than 1024 on the longest side, and that I had to make 90% or more of the scene invisible and make dozens of renders and then piece it all tegether in my graphic program.

I now have a nice shiney new computer and I am loving it! I can do raytracing and all kinds of things. Even a render taking 30 minutes now seems ultra speedy to me!

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi