As some of you may or may not know. When you start a batch render you don't need to have Maya open. In fact you'll get your renders done a whole lot quicker with it closed.

However, if your not using your pc you can get it to go a little bit faster by doing the following.

Get up your Task Manager open (Pressing Ctrl --> Alt --> Delete) and go into the Processes tab.

Click 'Mem Usage', this will make Task Manager list all the processes running on your machine in order of the memory that they are taking up. Mayabatch should be pretty high up there (if not at the top).

Right click on 'mayabatch' ---> Set Priority ---> High.

This will make windows give the memory priority to mayabatch, but watch out, while it is set to high everything else will grind to a halt so it's best to do this when your not using it (i.e overnight).

Hope this helps people out.