Alright.  I hope you excuse me for blogging.

I unplugged the D: drive.  The D: drive was actually a SATA II drive. The F: drive is a parallel IDE drive.

I then installed XP-64 on a previously unallocated portion of the C: drive.

Then came Vue 64. Also, I copied 10gb of files over to the new D: drive and deleted them permantly.

I ran VueMark. I got a score of :

515

I rebooted. Ran VueMark again and got score of:

580

The render times of the scenes are well, fickle, as they changed from each VueMark run.  On the first test run, 'Radiosity Room' and 'Cerro Verde' scenes completed in less time than they did during the second run.  However, 'Peaking Through' took roughly twice as long to render as it did during the second run.

Vue created a watermark on each render, slowing the processes.

It occurred to me whilst I was installing XP-64 again, that the background services might be formatting the raw hard drives (C and D were both clean installs). That is why I copied and deleted about 10 gigabytes of files, so that Windows would format the drive sectors, and then I would have the sectors available for Vue to use.

The hard drive did not blink during the VueMark renders, like they had before.

Now I have to get a new activation number from e-onsoftware. I am going through tech support this time, because I don't want update XP-64 with one smidgeon of code. I'm wary.

Charles