I've just begun using XSI as a 3D student, so there is more that I don't know than I do know. My problem is that whenever I try to render something, my computer reboots. My system is weak, but is it the problem? My specs are:
PIII/450 256 SDRAM ASUS P2B-F motherboard Diamond Viper TNT2 AGP video card Soundblaster Audigy MP3+ audio card 20G ATA/33 HDD Windows XP Pro
...all drivers are updated as of this week.
Is my old video card panicking under the load and taking the system down? Otherwise, XSI runs fine for the modeling we've done so far. Animation runs pretty slowly, so I know I'm already reaching the limits of what I'll be able to do with this computer, but I'm not going to be able to upgrade till I finish school and (hopefully) get a job, so I'm trying to squeeze the most out of what I've got.
I think the only thing in your hardware that could kill to this point Windows is the RAM, as rendering depends mostly on RAM and CPU.
256 Mb, with Windows 2000, is not that much. The system takes around 100 Mb, so it doesn't leave a lot. You should at least have 512... sorry to hear that you won't upgrade until you finish school. But I assure you it will make a difference.
In the meantime, you can turn on Verbosity in the Render Options (Logged Messages tab), and in the User Preferences, Scripting Logging tab, turn on Log Commands to File and Real-time Message logging. This will save to a file all that is logged in the Script Editor, so if your render crashes, you just to open this file and check what's the last thing XSI did. I might help you find if there is something in your scene that crashes the render.
Hope this helps Salutations - Cheers Bernard Lebel