Whhat kind of computer hardware do you have / need for doing this?

I have difficulty even opening a large rendered file in paint shop pro, and applying a filter or copying it and pasting as new layer will invariably crash the computer, even with regular maintenance, defragging etc. I have a PIII500 processor and 256 ram, running win98se.

By large I mean a bitmap or tif file, 9000x6750 or thereabouts, approx 174MB.

aartika! fractal art by Tina Oloyede :  http://www.aartika.co.uk