Can't render with particle effects...

[ianmage1]

For those of you who have seen my work, you probably know that I like to use a lot of particle effects... I'm well aware that particle effects take a long time to render, and I've been in situations where I've willingly waited days to export a few seconds of heavy particle effects. However, after upgrading to a new pc, I've ran into trouble where I never did before... I can't render a single frame of animation with particle effects!
Not even a preview can finish rendering... The rendering starts and makes zero progress for hours. (It doesn't crash though)

I have a Windows 8 Asus laptop with a dual intel core i5 and 8GB of memory (my old computer was a Windows 7 Toshiba laptop with a dual core intel celeron and only 2GB of memory).
In msconfig, I've changed the number of cores from 1 to 4 (my processor is dual core, but each core has two threads).
Since I typically export in quicktime format, I looked into changing the quicktime player's preferences (disabled Directx11; now using Safe mode-GDI only, as someone on this forum had suggested); nothing changed.
I've tried exporting to different formats and with shorter sequences of animation, but the same problem persists.

Is this all part of the process of upgrading your hardware? I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me best set up my computer for using ASP10.
Thank you.

[synthsin75]

As awful as it may sound, the first thing I'd try is disabling multi-thread rendering in AS.

[ianmage1]

Thanks synthsin. I just tried that, and the export has made progress, but very slowly as expected. I'm just glad to see it making some progress.

[synthsin75]

Glad that helps a bit, just sorry it's so slow. There seem to be quite a few rendering issues that are solved by single-thread rendering.