My system is ancient by contemporary standards, but it's what I've got and have to get by on until I can get some kind of paying work lined up. It's an AMD Barton 2900XP with 1GB. I'm also on an older version of Carrara, but I figure some of the same bugs may still be floating around.

And I know what you mean about the wait. It's hard to tell what you're going to get with settings sometimes, but the time involved to see what the result is tends to kill the rewarding aspect. Especially when you need settings turned up to see the result, and it's just some minor adjustments needed for things to be "just right".

Anyhow, lemme guess. Once the task manager goes crazy, you're seeing zig-zags on the CPU usage and if you watch the process list (sorted by CPU usage) you'll see Carrara and System Idle playing ping-pong with each other. Usually I don't see that until memory gets to just about .20 over a GB on mine. (I figure there may be a little bit of a buffer with video mem somehow.) But once it starts the craziness it's hitting the HDD pretty hard, so I know there's some virtual-mem thing going on.

Are you also using the large address aware hack for Carrara? I've noticed it mentioned a few times, but I don't have the system for it. If I did, I'd definitely check that out. You might be ping-ponging because you're hitting a ceiling in the software rather than the hardware.

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Barbequed Pixels?

Your friendly neighborhood Wings3D nut.
Also feel free to browse my freebies at ShareCG.
There might be something worth downloading.