Hey there, Lets try some troubleshooting: First, create a blank sphere on a blank plane with no sky, see if that renders at an acceptable speed. That will tell you if there's something wrong with your processor/cpu. Second, Look to see if you have too much lighting, maybe you have several sources in the same place from hitting Ctrl-D a few too many times? more light sources = slow rendering... (duh) And if worse comes to worse, get yourself a new processor :) all that memory is fine, but the processor is doin the work ;) I'd suggest an athlon 1.4 ghz, and 512 megs of DDR ram... the price is right, and it's what's in my system, and it works wonderfully :) Most of all, Good luck, we're intersecting our metaball fingers for ya :)