Andries Steketee's furious key-hammering produced this:
> Well i like to program in povray but when my scenes
> start to be a little complex, the render starts to
> need a real long time...
> [...]
> I use a AMD 500 with 256mb ram.

The best way to speed up rendering is to upgrade your processor.

If you can't afford to, I know of a few tips that you might find useful (my
processor isn't much faster than yours -- Pentium III 750):

Give yourself two lighting options -- simple and final
------------------------------------------------------
Your simple light would be a simple pointlight/spotlight while your final would
probably be an area light.  You'll also want to give yourself a simple way of
switching between the two.  The following code bite was used from my
Abstractified scene (see povray.binaries.images) and dramatically affects
rendering time (the code has been modified slightly to save space):

/* START OF CODE */
#declare SimpleLighting=on;

#if(SimpleLighting)
  light_source {
    <0,2,-5> rgb 1
    spotlight point_at<0,0,0>  radius 45  falloff 90  tightness 25
  }
#else
  light_source {
    <0,2,-5> rgb 1
    area_light <-2,5,-3.5><4,-1,-1.5>,10,10
    spotlight point_at<0,0,0>  radius 45  falloff 90  tightness 25
  }
#end //if(SimpleLighting)
/* END OF CODE */

Basically, you'd only change SimpleLighting to off when you're ready to render
your final scene.

Make alternate textures or use simple coloring
----------------------------------------------
Some textures (especially those using high-quality media) can take a very long
time to render, even on relatively small objects.

There are several ways you can go about reducing texture quality.  One would be
creating code to disable media using a method such as the one above, and another
would be using the quick_color property for use on lower quality levels (see
POV-Ray documentation, secture 5.2.6.1).

Use simpler objects
-------------------
If your scene uses complex objects that take a while to render, you might want
to consider using simple placeholder objects to take the place of that object
in previews (for example, if you have an isosurface that resembles of a sphere,
you may want to use a sphere as a substitute for it).  If you are using a
sphere_sweep, you may want to use a linear spline for test scenes rather than
a cubic spline (this affects rendering time more than you could imagine).

Disable the fancy stuff
-----------------------
Unless features such as radiosity are vital to rendering your scene, leave them
off until it comes time to render your (hopefully) final image.  These features
take a great deal of time to render, especially as your scene becomes more and
more complex.

Tweak what needs tweaked
------------------------
If you notice any lighting problems or anything like that after rendering a full
quality image, only render part of the image at full quality and tweak your
settings based on that (in Windows, that's as easy as clicking and dragging on
the area of the preview window you want to render).
------------------------

I've found that I tend to use the above techniques more than anything while I'm
working on a scene.  The final will probably take a while to render but it'll
probably look just as good as if you would have kept rendering full-quality
shots (and will take up much less of your time).  Abstractified, for instance,
took over 9 hours to render at 1280x960 on my system but I only had to render
it once.

-- 
/*^*/light_source{100*<-5,2,-5>2}#macro I(i,n)#while(strlen(i)>=n)#local A=asc(
substr(i,n,1));#local a=asc(substr(i,n+1,1));cylinder{<div(A,8)-12,mod(A,8)-4,4
><div(a,8)-12,mod(a,8)-4,4>,0.1pigment{rgb z}}#local n=n+2;#end#end I("ScUe[]"1
/*<*/)I("mkmtlttk"1)//@_$#!,:<"Thhis polysig brought to you by Ian Burgmyer :)"

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