Well, I just checked the stuff in my laptop. I've only got an AMD Sempron Processor 3000+ that gives me 1.8GHz of processing power and 192 MB of RAM. Just godawful. No wonder everything goes so slow! I guess the next step is to carefully examine the guts of my laptop and see if I can upgrade the stupid thing. If not, it'll be a while before I have the cash on hand to move up to a proper tower. Darn. Until that time I'll just be stuck doing small, single figure, non-ray traced, non-displacement mapped renders. Thanks for everyone's comments and help.