Ok, so I thought I would give Daz studio 4.8 a try since poser has been taking so long to render anything. I do only have poser 8...so I hope to find better features anyway.

But I am finding that it has been taking over 20 minutes to render the first tutorial image "Bare foot dancer." I say over 20 because I just shut it down at 20 since poser could do it much faster. I have downloaded luxrender, but do not yet have a plugin to use it. As it costs money for the plugins I am going to need another way to do it right now.

Is there something I am missing as to how to get faster render times without buying a new computer? 

Here are my computer stats:

Windows 7 Home Premium

 AMD V120 Processor 2.20 GHz

 2.74 GB Usable RAM

 64 bit

ATI Mobility  Radeon HD 4250

Well you can always delete all of the lights and lower the quality and size of your render.

This will make for a faster render, but it may not look very good...

As always, generally it's a balance between speed and quality.

Transparency in things such as hair or glass will also push up your render times.

If you are using iRay, you don't necessarily have to wait till it finishes rendering completely. If you are happy with the image quality just hit cancel on the main DS screen (Not the render window) and save it out.

Luxrender won't give you a faster render either quite the opposite from my experience.

Yeah...I was just looking into my computer stats and see that I have some low end stuff. I may have to just see what a few upgrades can do.

What would you say is best to upgrade for the purpose of a faster render? Would it be RAM or something? 

It's a fairly complex question tbh.

There is a lot of info on DAZ Forums for good render speed specs whether for PBR(iRay) or 3Delight renders.

WIth little info to go on I would suggest:

That the cheapest bang for your buck would probably be to invest in some more RAM less than 3GB usable is pretty low. When a render engine runs out of RAM it defaults to virtual memory which will slow things down a lot. More Ram will also speed up the UI if it lags at all and allow for bigger and more complex scenes.

For use of iRay I would suggest looking at a Cuda based Nvidia GPU card.

Hope this helps :)

If you can post your render settings we can have a quick look for anything that stands out.

I will agree with Razor42 on this. Since you are running a 64 bit OS, kick your RAM up to 12 gig if you can. If this is a Home built system, get a faster processor from eBay, if your comfortable getting into your computer. Also a faster spinning drive would not hurt at all. There are other tricks and I am assuming you are on a budget, so go for more memory!!!