I am still rendering an empty glass - with lots of raytracing its currently at about an hour a frame on my laptop. I realized today that I had forgotten that was running all by itself in the background while I was using Dragon voice recognition to dictate notes into Open Office while Spybot was scanning and I was entering prescriptions over the net.
I forgot, wow, no noticeable performance hitch in my other apps except for the first 15 seconds they opened, some, like dragon, often use 100% of resources. So the render basicly crawled along and let everything else take center stage. The thing it does worst is surfing the web when you have a slow server, taking a while to load a page, it jumps in and takes precendence and some pages have to be reloaded unless you set blender priority to below normal (winblows XP). Start it, forget about it, it’ll get done when its done. nice 