With her existing system, there are a few things she can do to speed up renders (assuming it is 10.5 or 11.
Reduce the size of the display window onscreen, choose texture medium or low for the render window and in preferences set the default Shape Display Quality to Draft. These things make a big difference to the render speed. On another Designers computer that I’m working on at the moment, the photo render took just 1.5 minutes – this machine is a crappy Dell running an AMD A8 at 1.9GHz but it rendered a full screen photo render faster than my Dell 2.4GHz i7! – the reason for this is that my Dell has a higher res screen and an inferior graphics adapter.
Also, and it is suprising how often I hit this, check the power settings for the laptop and choose the ‘High Performace’ option and download a utility such as CPU-Z to see what speed the processor is ACTUALLY running at. I have come across some laptops that for no apparent reason stick at 800MHz even when High Performance has been selected and they should be running at 2.4GHZ! Also ALWAYS run the renders when plugged into the mains as the processor throttles down when on battery.
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