Can my system handle Blender?

Hello, I’m a new member. I have a deep love of the art of making movies and games, and want to get my feet wet without spending a fortune… which to start with, I’m trying to find out whether or not my computer is capable of supporting Blender, and maybe what I’d need if it can’t.

These are the specs for the Windows 7 Home Premium I have:

AMD Quad-Core A8-3800 Accelerated Processor
6GB DDR3 System Memory
AMD Radeon HD 6550D Integrated Graphics
1 Terabyte Hard Drive [Currently using only one quarter of it]

If I tried downloading and using Blender now, what would happen?

You will become a Blenderhead :D.

You know Blender is open source. You do not even need to deep-install it (no registration, no admin rights). You can download the zip-version, unpack it and start Blender from the unpacked directory (I do it like that).

If you do not like it, you can remove the folder without a trace. There is no danger to try it out.

You might get be overloaded by the features and you need to get used to the UI with all these short-keys. But it is definitively worth.

have an AMD quad core A4, 4gb ram with radeon hd 8330 integrated graphics laptop and it works just finewith blender. it actually renders faster than my twin dual core xeons in my desktop for cycles rendering which is nice. just bear in mind that with an amd graphics you cant’ currently use the graphics chip to render, you’ll only have the cpu proccessor. you might get lucky in the new 2.75 version as some AMD graphics chips will be supported but don’t hold too many hopes for that!

Thanks for the advice, it’s very helpful! If I’m reading what you’re saying correctly, if I downloaded Blender right now, it wouldn’t cause it to crash unless I use the program beyond the computer’s capabilities?

Sorry if I seem overly cautious, but the computer I have is my center of online activity, I got everything I value on it, so if it goes kaboom I’m screwed!

EDIT: Turns out my fears were needless, just downloaded Blender, and it works fine. I don’t have a clue how it works yet, or how far I can currently go with it, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to find out soon!

Okay, I have another related question [hoping somebody will read this so I don’t have to start another topic…]

Now that I have Blender installed into my computer, which is still using the specifications I listed up top, how much do you guys think I could do with Blender? I know that making something like a Full CGI movie or video game is probably out of the question, even if I knew how to. But for the sake of argument, could my computer handle maybe the creation of just a single character, with motion rigging, enough to try and incorporate into live action film?