I have a Dell 8400 P4 w/2GB RAM and XP SP2. I've been impressed with some of the work others on this forum have done with AE so I've been trying to put together a test project.

However, I don't understand the render engine with AE since it virtually crawls and stalls out after about 1 minute into the timeline. I've got about 25 layers mostly 3D .tga files and a camera. It will only render if I reduce the resolution to 50%. Is this typical since I thought I had enough horsepower to begin with? OpenGL is enabled and I use Shift+RAM Preview.
Bob

Previews in AE render to RAM, so you can only render up to as much RAM as you have allocated to the program. It also previews as uncompressed video so it can eat up that RAM pretty quick, which is why it's not uncommon for you to have to reduce your preview resolution to see an entire composition, even with your system specs.

If you want to preview the entire animation at full res, you need to adjust the work bar on your timeline to render the section you want and increment at a time, or add the comp to the render queue, set the quality and file parameters and render out to a file.