i can tell another story: i bought two same ibm hard disks - 40 gb each - and called a friend who is hardware expert and vendor (microsoft certifikate and stuff) to do it. after starting the pc with both disks on, my cd drive had no power! no electricity at all! we checked everything: cards, drivers, other drives software, hardware - nothing. it just wouldn't budge. houres later i pluged one ibm drive off and put in another drive from seagate (also 40 gb) and tadaaa: all is fine! so what does it all tell us? no idea. :o) but i never heard that someone said: "my 3ds max won't run on my system/won't render/gives me c-exceptions/bsod on me". g'night!