Before you upgrade your RAM, upgrade your operating system to Windows 2000. Win98 is the source of your problems. I can render Vicky2 with the Daz High-Res textures (the most resource-intensive textures of them all, far more so than Asia) on an AMD K6-2 450 with 128 MB of RAM, running Win2K Professional. However, when trying to render the SAME scene on my other machine -- a machine thats 10x as powerful (T-Bird 1100Mhz, 640MB of RAM, 64MB Geforce2 Ultra) -- running Win98 or ME it freezes almost ALL of the time. Win9x has very poor memory management skills, and that is the root of your problem. Even if you were to add a GB of RAM to your machine you would still freeze under 9x. (And yes, WinME is a 9x OS -- its just a glorified win98)