I should add:

I THINK "...that IDE refers to BUS/Transfer technolgoy"

IDE is a type of Hard Drive that referrs to the BUS/Transfer technolgoy - Hard Drives can be IDE or SCSI.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independant (or Inexpensive) Disk

RAID is basically...

Also - I have a 16MB TNT nVidia Video Card - Do you think that is the problem?

I was playing a WMV tutorial (from SM :)) - Maybe that was the problem.

I just reformatted my machine so I don't think I need a system refresh...

I just installed Maya and oh my god it is slow - I realize that it is doing a ton of calculations on the fly to add light and objects, etc, but I can't believe that it would be that slow.

Adding...

After doing some research, I stumbled onto this tutorial about rendering in passes.

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/passes_layers/passes_layers.html

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1998/Jun98/avidpr.asp

Holy SHIT!!! I stand corrected.....I thought you for a shit...but I am wrong....This is freakin' crazy - I realized it happened years ago, but MS owning a major 3D platform.

I assume you are referring to the last part:

"got them into a position where they could start on XSI and then sold it on."

are you saying that MS owned Softimage and then sold it.

kal - I am not sure where you got this info, MS doesn't own Softimage.