I have 1.24gb of ram and my scene consists of a subdiv model (the thylacine post in WIP). As soon as I added joints to it, it stopped rendering...I've had Maya fur attached to it before but it still rendered just fine. It'll still render with Maya Software, Hardware, and Maxwell but I need to use Mental Ray.
I do have 256mb of ram from a different company, but I installed the 1gb last week, before I added the joints and it still rendered fine. Also, the weird thing is sometimes when I just create a new scene, add any sphere and just ask mental ray to render that, it doesn't work. I just get a blue screen saying it's done. It's really frustrating it seems it just quit on me for good