CompuServe Thread

JNJ, you may want to consider getting OS/2 2.11 on your machine. With it, you can set up TWO instances of 3D Studio that will run at the same time. One will be in the background running as a Slave Renderer, while the other runs in the foreground full-screen allowing you to model projects while others are rendering! When you're not actively using the foreground task or doing anything else, the background task will actually render almost as fast as it would on an identical machine running single-user MS-DOS! In some cases (those which would require Phar Lap swapping under MS-DOS), they'll actually render somewhat FASTER! Even when you ARE using the foreground task, the background will still render at a pretty good clip, allowing you to get some rendering done while you're working! I recommend OS/2 2.11 instead of the newer OS/2 3.0 Warp because the latter's optimizations for space (to run on 4MB RAM machines) was done at the expense of speed. Warp FEELS faster because IBM boosted the priority of user-interface threads (such as redrawing of windows, etc.) to make the user-interface respond "snappier," again at the expense of actual performance of actual "work" tasks. As a result, Warp is noticeably and in some cases significantly SLOWER than 2.11 in actual work performance, even though it "feels" faster. OS/2 SMP woudl be even better, of course, but for the price you'd pay for a good SMP multi-Pentium CPU you could buy an equivalent number of separate Pentium machines and network 'em.