Leaving everything at the defaults should usually be the best strategy. If you're willing to trade a little quality for speed, you can change the texture filtering from "quality" to "fast". Don't set it to "none", that is in many cases the slowest option.

"Stewer, should I run a tiny render without lights to load my textures and then do the real render?"

No, just render when you need to render. Anything else is just using extra time.