Hey guys, hope things are going better for you than me...

I have been having SERIOUS trouble w/ frequent and constant crashing during my renderings using C7.1.1Pro...

Maybe you guys could give me some hints, tips and pointers on things to be careful of, or settings that can be adjusted to make things run smoother?!? I dont usually have problems w/ my renders, but lately Ive been doing some stuff thats "not my usual style", and so my scenes are being set up somewhat different to what Im used too, still, I didnt think it was anything major to have such dramatic crashing come about...

1st off, my system is far from the greatest. An AMD Sempron 2400, w/ 2 GB of memory, 40GB hdd (but I use an external of 300GB) running XP Pro. No video card (but thats never been a problem before?!?), and nothing else fancy or worth mentioning...

I have my scratch disk set to 100MB, and my virtual memory/paging file set to 4096. Im assuming that those are common/correct settings? As far as my renders go, I dont think anything is wrong per say with the textures or objects. Unused shaders and objects have been removed from the scene, and textures have been consolidated. My render settings are at a bare minimum, so I cant possibly downplay the settings w/o loss of output quality... I can only render but so small, so am unable to render at a lower size (heck, Im only trying to get a 500x375 for crying out loud)...

I got so desperate I even set up the network rendering, and while it works and even quite fast, if the main system crashes, all is lost... I did find that you can pause/resume a render if one of the nodes fail or crash on the other systems, but there isnt no way of recoving the partial render from the crash of the main system...

I am going BONKERS over here... If I thought a new, more powerful system would help, Id get a new one 10 minutes ago, but I hear so many others having similar problems (albeit maybe not as often?!?), but it happens on powerful systems all the same...

Is there anything I could do, I really need to finish this project up, but have been totally unable to get my renders completed and its KILLING me!!!

If anyone could offer some advice, Id be greatly appreciative, thanks for lending me your ear to vent.....

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