I wasn’t going for a realism effect. Its not supposed to look like something in our world; just an abstract peice.
That really IS a long rendertime! I have a very similar PC configuration, and it’s not that bad. For one, the graphics card has basically nothing to do with rendering (think of command line rendering…). The speed of the CPU itself is important, the rendertime is almost exactly inversely proportional with the CPU speed. So getting a 2000 Mhz PC will speed it up by 33%, which isn’t much. The amount of RAM can also be a bottleneck, your’s seems too low, but then this picture doesn’t contain any insanely complex meshes, so it doesn’t relly affect this scene.
Where’s the problem? I’m almost sure its the AO. Try turning it off, I’d say you’ll get a 20 times speed increase. The problem is with the way Blender calculates AO (Octree), which makes large sized scenes take way too long to render.
I had a similar problem, where a scene took over 10 hours. It was just a few objects placed onto a plane, which I made huge, to fill in the camera’s vision. Someone told me the huge plane was the problem, I scaled it down, and bingo, the scene rendered in about 30 minutes!! You should check to see that there are no unnecessarily large meshes in your scene.
As for the picture, my crits:
Use a higher resolution texture on the walls, I can see the pixels of the original textures in the rendered picture (no, it’s not because of the jpg compression). Or instead, make the texture smaller, and therefore repeat it more: set the SizeX, SizeY, SizeZ higher.
Add a little bevel to the walls, the corners look razor sharp, ergo unrealistic.
I’d also add at least one lamp with a warmer colour, to make a bit of a contrast, and add a note of interest in the picture.
Zsolt
I had another scene that I couldn’t render becasue it took to long. It seems like my renders have been taking longer and longer lately. But any ways, I had a pretty complex scene. I had 4 subsurfed, raytraced chrome rims with Ray shadow spotslights maped to a subdivison level 3 ico sphere. So yea, it took a long time. But I tried rendering it on a 2.5 GHZ comp and it didn’t go much faster, so… 
Also, you said to increase the xy and Z axis on the image texture. Do image textures have a Z axis??
I don’t think image textures have a Z axis, they are made in only 2 dimensions.
I meant the sizeX, sizeY and sizeZ buttons in the Material settings, “Map To” panel. These refer to the coordinates of the 3D object, not the texture. Increasing the sizeX,Y and Z won’t affect the texture, but the number of times the texture is placed along the X, Y and Z axis of the object.
Zsolt