I’m having some problems with Blender crashing on a new quad-core system. I was going to try and download an optimised build but have never done it before and, quite frankly, haven’t got the slightest idea what I’m doing! :o
My system properties are:
Dell Precision PWS390
Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU @ 2.66GHz, 3.25GB RAM.
Some help would be most excellent!
Elye
well… what blender version exactly are you using (I mean the one that is crashing)?
Optimised builds are faster but IMHO often not stable enough. Try using an official build - since you have got four cores you should have enough processing power anyway.
remember to set the threads number in the render-buttons window to 4 
- of course, this only affects rendering but I do not think a project can get too big for a non-optimised blender (especially with your system specs :D)
I am using the official 2.42a. I can see the threads button but it says “Enable/Disable render in two threads”???
they are adding up to 8 threads in the new version, for now you would need a CVS build
The “8 threads” option is in 2.43rc2 (sorta kinda a CVS version 
Elye_Ball :
For Windows, I’ve been using JMS’s build :
Or you can use the “2.43rc” builds … there’s a thread in the News& Discussion forum with links to those builds.
Mike
Thanks… I’ve tried one of the CVS builds and have enabled 4 threads… All I can say is ZOOM! That is some fast rendering!!!
However, this doesn’t help me with the fact that Blender (the official build) still crashes a lot on my new system. It crashes randomly but also always when I try one thing: Drawing a box over half a sphere to select half the verts?!?
Well the CVS build is probably going to be the next “official” build (2.43) in the next two weeks or so 
And if it’s NOT crashing where the “official” build is, then it would appear that whatver bug you’ve run into in the official version has been fixed in CVS.
You can read about code changes here in the comitters logs :
http://projects.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/
Also, I have been using CVS builds almost exclusively for the past year or so. In my experience they are 99% as stable as the “offiical” builds. The (very) occaisional crashes are offest by the daily bug fixes and improvements / new features that are continually added … like those thread features you mentioned
If you want a render test, download the Elephant Dreams files … or just compile them off the DVD you bought :D. And try compiling one of the scenes. Or try the massive ~100meg file that’s in the “The Crosswalk Thread” in the News and Discussion forum.
Mike
Thanks for the replies! I eventually tried updating the graphics drivers… despite having a new build and it seems to have solved the problem! Thanks to this post (solutions to common problems):
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=13255
It pays to search!