I'm willing to bet your processor is a hell of a lot faster than the one in her laptop.

Laptops are great for portible computing, but unless you spend 5 grand on them, they are really not meant for 3d application rendering.

Yeah, if you dumb things down enough they can render in a reasonable time, but the result you are going to get are going to look like things from poser 5 or less, without any of the oh, WOW! great rendering options.

That said, thats why you have the render que. Setup your renders, send them to the que, and then just let them render while you sleep. Thats what we used to do in the old days when computers weren't that powerful.

I remember rendering a glass sphere on a checkerboard floor, and the render taking almost two days. I set it up friday night, and it was done around mid day on sunday.

 

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.