I got a new WinXP PC with a 2.8 GHz chip.  I ran the benchmark.pov scene
this PC and an old one with 1 GHz.  Both boxes are WinXP.

Results:
  2.8 GHz  13361  secs
  1.0 GHz    5315 secs.

Comments:

1) This *does* play in to my cynicism that advances in hardware are going to
be taken up by the demands of the operating system for ads,  checks on the
internet for Windows bugifixes every other minute, etc...

2) I just downloaded 3.5 and didn't make any checks for render priority,
etc. Perhaps this makes all the difference in the world.

3) The new PC went into a sleep mode by the next morning, a harder, deeper
sleep, and I know it does so after a much shorter time than the old one.
Perhaps the folks who design sleep modes  never consider you might need to
do some CPU-intensive stuff while you're away: they probably figure that if
you're not typing at the word processor, you have absolutely no need for the
CPU at all.   I've always wondered how povray interacts with the sleep cycle
of various versions of windows.

4) On my 1 GHz PC, I  have several times seen povray's render get hung up by
an error message from WinXP that it had lost contact with the internet.
Now, I may be pushing the envelope even further by having two PC's with
wireless modems right next to each other.  WinXP is always giving me
messages about the status of this connection, and it's even more
intermittent now that I have two PC's on my wireless router.  It's also
likely that my brand of wireless modem is not WinXP-friendly, which may
cause additonal problems.     I also (stupidly) may have asked the PC
company to install network capabilities (a lan card??) that I don't even
need, and this may cause WinXP to spend lots of time fussing over it.

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