Stephen McAvoy wrote:

> I put POV-Ray in the system tray during a long render. Now I cannot
> see it to check on the progress. Using Task Manager I can see that
> pvengine.exe is running in the Processes tab but not in the
> Applications tab. Just before this occurred iexplorer crashed and now
> Task Manager does not show in the system tray either. It looks like a
> reboot to me but I don't want to stop a render that has been running
> for 10 hours or so. Any advice?
> 
> Regards
>         Stephen

This is EXACTLY why I installed Linux on my system - one of the greatest
motivators was stability during rendering.

Have you considered partitioning off 5GB or so and installing a Linux
distribution there expressly for rendering? This is exactly what I have
done - I still design scenes in Windows, but then render them in Linux - I
have often left traces running for weeks at a time in it. Modern
distributions are a snap to install and setup, and Povray runs like a charm
on my RedHat 9 system. One caveat though is that most Linux distributions
(as far as I know) still can't reliably read or write NTFS - which is why I
expressly installed XP with a FAT32 filesystem. This allows full
compatibilty - I design and finalize in Windows, then crank up Linux and
with one minimal ini-file change I render, in Linux, on the Windows
partition, using the scene just as it is. You just have to take a little
care with how you specify paths, as those can cause a bit of problems. But
otherwise, great!

-- 
Stefan Viljoen
Software Support Technician
Polar Design Solutions

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