Blender.org

[quote="bluemonkmn"]I can't read the error message I'm seeing very well because it only appears for a fraction of a second each time I click Render (where can I see the full message more easily?) [/quote]
have you tried rendering by commandline?

for 300 you get plenty of gfx-power today. :)

you may take a look here and compare yourself:
http://benchmark.cd3dtech.com/Benchmark/benchmark.html

in the render-settings, go to "sampliing" and adjust the samples for "Render". it defaults to 10 - try 20, 40, 60, ... step-by-step.
for a final render the samples will be in a 3-digit area for sure, if not 1000+, depending on your scene and scene-lighting.

sorry, i don't know.

on the left hand side of your 3d-view is the tools-panel (if not, press 't').
there are shading-options - click 'smooth'.

may be caused by a model textured for cycles-engine.

...sorry, forgot to mention: when starting by commandline, blender will quit after work. so if you prefer to go into idle/sleep mode after rendering simply start blender as a background-process by commandline. after rendering, without blender running and without work to do, your systems APM will do ...

you can easily get this feature by yourself, starting the job via commandline in a batch (.cmd/.sh or automator, depending your OS) with a shutdown/power-off command as the last line.

could you give me the .blend to try my own?

i would check your material/nodeeditor for checker-nodes and/or material-settings, but thats just a first guess. where is the lightsource you turned shadows on? looking at the shadows it must be somewhat out of the camerafield facing the TV. seems more like a projection (room-in-room) than a shadow-...

nodes are booting over nfs but swap is on a 7200rpm local SATA-device, so IO would be ok, to speak for swapped memory. as said, i don't mind when performance would slow down on bigger scenes/frames when system comes to paging, as long as blender keeps stable.

use the "R" method. select your objects, hit "R" and type "45.5" on your keypad.

have you checked you got all needed packages installed in x64 version, too?

maybe you could use a servicewrapper like instsrv or srvany. never tried it with blender, but it should work (...ok, last time i used the above was on an nt4-server ^^).
what about calling a batchfile as a background-process? psexec on the master for the slaves would to the job, too.

[quote="stiv"]As long as you have a swap file, a modern OS will use it if an application needs more memory. You can still run out of memory on a 32 bit system because the processor can only address about 4 gigabytes of memory.[/quote] thanks for the reply. i know about the (soft) 4GB limit per 32bit...