Sorry to bother you with all my problems regarding blender. But I wonder if there where a way to speed up the rendertime as mine renderer is so very slow. even for simple scenes. My latest project takes forever even when I am trying to make a preview with small resolution. (250*250 pixels) I had it going for many hours and I didn't see any progress. I wonder if its something wrong with my computer or my blender. I have reinsalled blender 2 times to try to fix the problem. I have also tried to maximize the memory as it needs a lot of memory. It peaks at 1,36 Gb and staays there. The system window show the renderer is running.

By the way I got an AMD 2200+ with 1 Gb of ram and about 1,5 Gb of swap file. My graphics card is Nvidia Gforce 6600 with 128 Mb of ram. IU have installed WinMem Optimizer that supposedly should free up some ram by dumping unused programs and file from the memory. The program is runniing in thew background. Could that have something to do with it?

there are tons of things you can do.  how fast are your renders normaly for what scenes?  try reducing the samples. how complicated is the scene your using?  unless your rendering in gelato, the graphics card is not important.  

from the size of the memory being used i'd say that the scene is way to detailed.    

try using yafray, its generaly faster.

it could also be a virus.  if its not to much trouble, you could try rendering on another computer or maybe even reinstall windows (or linux, i recomend kubuntu or ubuntu)

The scene is not very detailed at all. Got it setup with 2 arealights and turning of bothe AO and OSA.

I have checked for viruses and done searches with avg antivirus. Spybot search and destroy, Abexo Registry Cleaner, Zappit, Adaware and CCleaner.  Didn't find any thing except some autodialers that I removed.

autodialers?  thats not realy so great.  when there is spywhere, there is a trojan.  i have learned that the hard way.

that scene isnt tooooo complicated.   but the fan thingy is a bit complicated,  try turning it off and seeing what happens.  

or... try using yafray,  you might get better results and faster speed.  or kerkythea, or sunflow (particularly fast)

however,  there are something that might supprisingly be a nasty.  check for overlapping verticies,  if two meshes are placed ontop of each other tooo perfectly,  it could cause problems, no idea why, but i've seen it happen.

I shall try to remove double vertices. But as seen in my avatar and on a pic I have in the gallery. I have rendered out the fan thingy. That went allraight. Don't remeber excactly how fast that was. But as I made the cabinet besides it. It does take much more time. doesn't see any progress at all.

if double verticies doesnt work (not only in edit mode, in object mode)  try yafray!!!!  its not as hart as you'd think to master.  

I have rtried out yafray. I have made it work but I have not tried it on this project.. There where no doubles to be removed in the scene

With Yafray I did get an error message stating: "This Application has requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.....
Could not Excecute yafray. Is it in path?"

As I am aware of it is in the path. It did open and converted the file and started building kg-trees. but then stoped with that message.

 If you are using the internal renderer, here are some tips for speeding up your render times.

1. AO:
        AO is just a simulated GI process. It looks really good to use for your final render, but while doing test renders, definitely turn this off. When you are ready to start perfecting your final render, turn AO back on and reduce the number of samples in your area light settings as well as AO sample settings. Set all these to 1 till you feel you have the right amount of light in the right areas, then raise them a little. For final render, I recommend around 9 samples for all.
2. OSA
       While OSA is a definite for final renders, turning this off for your test renders will speed them up quite a bit. Even when on, setting the samples to the lowest setting (5) is enough for some scenes. Another way to speed things up (concering OSA) is to render your image at double size or larger, with OSA turned off, then scaling the images down later in Photoshop or some other 2D app. This will give the same effect as OSA, but can be faster on certain types of scenes. But for test renders, just turn this off.
3. Area Lights
        Using area lights with AO and OSA? This is the slowest you could possibly render anything. While it looks very nice for your final render, try turning off the ray shading button of your area lights for quicker test renders.
4. Ray Tracing
        the Raytrace button is the quickest and easiest way to add instant realism to your scene. While its possible to fake the effects of ratracing in your scenes (animators rarely use ratracing, especially not whole scenes), it can take alot of trial and error to get somthing looking just right without it. I recommend using it for rendering still scenes, but if you are venturing into animations, turning this on can turn hours and hours of rendering into days and days. For early test renderings of your scene, you can turn this off to speed things up.
5. Subsurfacing
        In the modifier panel for subsurface, there are settings Levels: and Render Levels: You of course know that Levels: represents the level of subsurfacing you see in your 3d view, and Render Levels: represents the level of subsurfacing that will be done at rendertime. Reducing this level for test renders can speed up rendertimes for complex scenes.
6. Render Size
       Also,(as you have already tried) reducing the size of the image to be rendered will speed up render times. I recommend setting the X and Y to constant settings, and using the quick buttons in the render panel to change the size for test renders. Hitting the 50% button will render an 800x600 scene at 400x300, and the 25% button would render it at 200x100. Its just easier : )
7. threads
       Enable the use of threaded rendering by clicking the threads button in the output panel. This will render two sections of your image at the same time, and even on a single core computer with no hyper-threading at all, I have noticed a slight increase in speed. On your system, it should show a little more increase.

With all these things in mind, you should be able to render with Blender's built-in renderer very quickly, and adjust the different factors as needed as you approach the final stages of scene creation.
While Yafray has the power to render some very realistic images, I can not reccommend using it at all if you are interested in speeding up your rendertimes. At its most basic settings, it is still takes about twice as long to render than the built-in renderer(on Windows systems)

Thank you so very much for your help. I have used quit a lot of subsurface dividing to get things smooth. I will try to turn those of and do the other things too.

OK, and a little rough advice from me...

If you still have this problem, I`d suggest sth like that: try importing the whole scene into a new file and then render it. Maybe you have some odd setings in your file. Your render times are enormous for a <1M vert project-my current proj takes some 8 mins to render on internal, 800x600 with 5x oversampling, though it is some 2,5 mln vert (Celeron 1,4, 0,5GB mem). Importing everytghing into a new one is my "Last line of defense" when everything goes wrong:):)

How do you import them into a new file?

• Start Blender with a new scene.
• Delete everything from it.
• File>Append, navigate to your old scene. Click on it, then you will have a choice between Objects, Lights, etc. Click Objects (I hope this is exactly how the category is named, anyway, it`s sth about items in your scene;), then you will be presented with the list of the contents of your old file. Hit a key to select all and confirm your decision. Then you will have everything from your old scene in a
  new file, except the settings:)

Since there`s no ctrl c - ctrl v ability to paste from outside the current Blender window (even from another B win), this is also the only way I know for moving objects from one scene to another when creating new projects from old stuff.

ok. thanks. I did get a bit confused of the memory usage. seemed unessesary high.

I wonder what is this filling the octree means?

I am now trying to render it on my brothers computer with 2 gigs of memory and double core cpu. It doesn't take so much memory here as it did on my computer. but it is still working on filling the octree. What that is I don't know and it has counted up to ca 2609000. And is that lot?
It have been working like that the last 4 hours.

turn down the subdivision modifier amount 2 divisions. turn on smoothing.  all this can be done from the buttons panel-->edit thingy. maybe you should post the file. let some of us experiment with it.  a scene that simple with simple materials should not take a long time.  if your working with the blender internal turn off ambient occlusion.  

of course, you could have found some sort of bug. 

If you wanna have the blend file you can email me on tobak30@hotmail.com and request my files. Then I will send them over to you.