No pain no gain. If you use the P4 dork with dork hair, and P4 render, in P5, its just as fast as doing the same thing in P4. If you want to use all the extra bells and whistles, they are bound to come with a price. I remember someone saying "640k ought to be enough for anyone". I also recall that same person saying "storage is cheap". If we are going to have a new app on the market, then we have to expect that it will need a more robuste machine. Heck, I guess we could all go back to DOS 5. You have any idea how screaming fast that would run on a 2.2 machine? I bet you're glad you don't have to program your image files in basic though. Lots of the new apps are forward looking to technology. This is a change from the old way of doing things. In the past, folks made apps that ran fast on the existing technology. But in that old thinking, people complained that the upgrades were merely nominal changes. Now comes apps like Pandromeda, P5 and rumors of a new Bryce 6 that all are betting on a technological explosion to run. If you wanna be seen in a Porsche, you better get ready to pay the shop a time or two. If not, go get an old station wagon. Sorry, I hear your frustration. I'm not all that excited about upgrading either, but its the way of the dinosaur. Bigger and smarter eats the predicessors.