Well I have a dual core and since Poser 7 I've used Render in separate process with four threads. Works great.

Perhaps your laptop didn't have sufficient cooling? That might explain the crash. Also even when you shut down Poser, Firefly.exe is still running most of the times. You can see it (and kill it) in the Task Manager.

I do have a screensaver on my computer, mostly for the nice look. >It hasn't interfered with my renders... yet.

And the solution to cats walking on the keyboard? I always make sure I have some other window in focus before I leave Poser rendering overnight. Sometimes, if it's my messenger program, I can see my cats have been trying to communicate with the outside world... :lol:

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You just can't put the words "Poserites" and "happy" in the same sentence - didn't you know that? LaurieA
  Using Poser since 2002. Currently at Version 11.1 - Win 10.