Hi Tim, yes unfortunately the booleans do quite a lot of calculation so you can expect that they will tend to be slow.

> but it has over a Gig of memory and a reasonable graphics card

The boolean calculation speed is entirely dependent on your CPU speed, unless you run out of memory but I think you'd be fine at more than 1GB. What CPU speed do you have for your computer?

One thing you can do to speed things up if the speed is really getting in the way of doing your work, is to work on surfaces instead of solids, and then use Trim to cut only the surfaces that you know are slicing into each other.

Booleans basically do a lot of automatic Trim and Join operations for you, but they will tend to do a lot of checking for any intersections between 2 solids. You can kind of get more of a "fine-tuned" control over the process if you do the trimming and joining between surfaces yourself. But it is a lot less convenient, it is probably better to just wait a few minutes until the booleans finish.

- Michael