That 300mb was the amount of free memory while Maya was trying to render the scene - should have been a bit more specific then. I checked the pixels and yes, it was within the 5000 range. I have managed to render the scene in the meantime by running optimizeRender - and also realized that I did not need such a large texture in the end...

What still boggles me is how I could render the scene with a computer that was not even half of the current configuration that i now have.

By the way, Rich, I checked the size of the scene and it is about 10 Mb, which is more than my 52k dial-up modem can handle - i'd be sitting here all night uploading it. Thanks for the offer, though.