Quote - ...--Fewer polygons, so I can place two or three ladies in a scene without fouling up my computer
...

Bit of a side note: I have PP2010 - which I thought I'd never get until a deal came up I simply couldn't turn down! - which I'm running on this really pov system with only a gig of RAM. had the same issues as you: two people on the scene, and THUNK! system brought to its knees. Not a pretty picture.
Well, I had a chat to KobaltKween about it, and she suggested resizing the skin - creating a smaller version - so I reduced the texture image size from 3000 x 3000 to 2000 x 2000: this had a net effect of dropping the file size for, say, the face from 3.13 megabytes to 122 kilobytes!

And, from a render standpoint, when rendering two people, you really can't see the difference.

I've been reducing other textures as well in hopes of bringing down the texture-memory levels to where I can add more items to a scene.

Yeah, I know perhaps I should consider upgrading to 2 or 3 gig of RAM. They say RAM is so cheap these days. Well, I just bought some - just now - and DDR2 isn't as cheap as newer stuff... and besides, there will always be a point when you run out of RAM, even on a 6 gig system, so it's a good thing to be thinking about.

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks