Personal opinion here, your best bet would be dual Intel Xeon DP processors, they will be coming down in price quite a bit in the next 2 weeks ( I believe ). Intel makes a top notch workstation board, they sell it as a server board, however, this board has an 8x agp slot, this is the same board that I understand IBM is using. The Intel board is SE7505VB2. Unless you are rendering something really hugh, you should be able to get by with 1 gig of memory. The video card is not real important if all your are going to do is render. If memory serves me correctly, you can get the above combo for less that 1100 dollars, at least from the vendor that I use. Any questions, feel free to email or IM me. skydiver

I have a Sony 256meg MicroVault. Absolutely love it, much quicker and easier for moving files from pc to pc than burning a CD. skydiver

Catlin I would guess that as far as any of us know, Corel has not hired back Bryce coders, therefore I would suspect that they will keep Bryce alive by keeping it in the mind of the users, in other words add the links back in until they have finalized the sale of Bryce with another company. Personally, I do not view Bryce as a 'core' element of Corel and therefore I believe that VC will sell Bryce off. They are not going to let it go into open source and they will not let if just die. Bryce is a product that is very 'sellable' and a way that VC can rid themselves of some overhead and make a little bit back on their investment. The suggestions made by Rayraz are all very valid, in my heart I hope that his second suggestion is correct. Wouldn't that be great if VC were actually going to start working on Bryce again! :) skydiver

For what Vector Capitol has paid for Corel, it is unlikely that the present Corel management, as poor as it is, will have much to say about the direction the company will take. VC will have to decide, if they have not already, if Bryce fits into their 'core' business. In otherwords, a phone company probably won't sell lightbulbs, so they dump the lightbulb factory. VC will be asking theirselves if Bryce is a part of their core business. One could make an uneducated guess that based on the fact that Corel/VC dumped the price of Bryce and offloaded, most likely, the bulk of their onshelf inventory, that they plan on selling Bryce to another company or, and let us hope not, shelve Bryce. If one wanted to guess further as to the future of Bryce, they could probably ask what has happend to the folks at Corel that coded and supported Bryce. Are they still there. Have they been reassigned to other projects? How many have left in the last several weeks? Since this is a guessing game, we really will not know until VC makes their move and you can bet that they will be very tight lipped about what they will be doing, especially if they plan on selling or shelving one or more of their products. I just hope that Bryce manages to survive. skydiver

BazC, you may want to contact Corel, especially in light of their sale to Vector. In the event that Bryce is sold off to another outfit, the most current customer database will go with that sale. Getting matters straight with Corel now and getting your name on their owner list could save you heartburn latter on down the road, should Bryce wind up being sold off. skydiver

"and advise them to give Bryce to someone who cares about it, like Doc Mojo" Catlin" I agree Catlin, I suspect that we will find out that Corel has indeed found a buyer for Bryce. If this where the case, the buyer may have wanted all existing inventories to be depleted. The new owner would then have no competition from leftover stock and have a larger customer base that they could offer the 'new and enhanced version' to. Of course this "new" version may well wind up being a mix of Bryce and another program that is already successful on the market and when that program would be ready for the market would be a wild guess. Of course, all that I have said above is nothing more than conjecture. skydiver

2 homegrowns Intel p4 2.66 gig cpu, Intel d850emvrl mb, PNY Gforce 4600, maxtor 60 gig drive, Plextor cd drive, 512 meg Rdram (1066). Asus CUV4x-D mb, dual Intel 866 mhz processors, 512 meg sdram ( pc133 ), Matrox g400 max, Matrox 60 gig drive, Plextor cd drive. Poser, Bryce, Photoshop Elements, Terragen and other have ran perfect on both systems using Win 2000 as the os. Mercate

I have yet to see a 'financially stable company' lay people off. The company I work for has 57 billion in debt, they call it an 'overall stategy' too when they lay us off. Good luck Coop.

Are you aware of the MS style registration scheme that CL has resorted to. If not, you may want to read about it on the CL web site. If you are not opposed to their registration method you may still want to wait as P5 has had the heck patched out of it, you may want to wait until they release their next package. Mercate

Correct me if this not true, but the last time I did the W2k auto update and chose their media player 7.1, I do believe that it installed some adaptec drivers. I do not remember if I saw it as a subdirectory or via on of the reg cleaner programs. Louis

Same here, I refuse to buy software that has a dongle or has a security and registration package like CL is using on P5. This is the very reason that I did not move from W2k to XP. This is an unfortunant situation for CL, I understand that they fear losing money, however, they have lost my business and they have lost it for as long as they insist on this security package. The warez folks have very likely, already popped the code for P5. And yes, I am a licensed owner of P4. Mercate