hey remeber way back in 2005 when there was a benchmark topic with a ring.blend well i tried rendering it to see how good my system was and blender crashed does that mean theres a bug in my version of blender or that i have a really bad system? i think system and cant wait to have the cash to upgrade hope this is in the right topic area it seemed the right one, thanks for your help people 
I suppose it could. yup
lol
well I don’t think you gave enough info for a straight answer =)
There is the long-running ‘blender render benchmark’: http://www.eofw.org/bench/
For comparison: I got 58sec using a Core 2 Duo processor at 3.0Ghz.
I got 3:12 on a Pentium D (2 cores) @ 2.8Ghz.
05:20:84 hmm think its time to upgrade