The fur on that monkey in the picture appears to just be a UV Map (it's painted on).

On the other issue: I have two machines, I compose the scene on one, save it to a network drive, then render it on another machine on the network. I realize there is some cost involved in that ;) But there are two upsides: (1) My scene by definition is saved before I start rendering, and (2) since I do comics, I can keep working on them while rendering is going on rather than losing my train of thought. I have a pair of Dell Precision Workstations I bought used, so the whole system came in around $2,500.