My machine finally finished defragmentation. Rendering again took 44 seconds. Exactly the same as before LOL! Tried on my Win98 installation. (without proper display drivers, just in 64048016 because it somehow refuses other resolutions) Rendertime was 45 seconds. Did a fresh install of Win2000 advanced server on that first 10GB partition with FAT32 filesystem. Only installed DirectX8.1, Radeon8500 drivers and Wacom tablet drivers. Rendering now took 43 seconds. Wow! 1 second faster :-)))) So, it's not the filesystem, it's not the place on the harddisk. It's not the harddisk itself. So why is Johnnydnh's system faster? I can't believe it is because he is running XP, but I might try an install of that later this week. Marc