Slow Render and multiple crashes

We have a couple projects on the timeline with some layered effects on the clips including transitions. The render time for these 3-4 minute projects are taking HOURS! Multiple hours! We are waiting to watch the completely rendered project and if any minor edits need to be made, we are back to square one waiting on the thing to render AGAIN! We have been dealing with this all weekend! The render time is moving very slow! We are also experiencing numerous crashes with FCPX. What can we do? Is it worth trashing FCPX and doing a re-install? Please help!

Reinstalling will almost certainly do nothing for you. Render speed can only be helped by processor speed, both CPU and GPU, RAM and drives. Of course what you have to render, original media and effects, are a huge component.

More info would be helpful. Like system specs, format you're working with etc.

I had the same problem over the weekend. all i did was change some color and some levels and 1hr and 20 project took over 20 hrs to render out and i am using a a dual quad 2.8 10 gig ram and my video card is older, a invidia 8800 gt 512mg + the original 256mg card that came with it.
i know it might be a coincidence but i turned it on last night and my monitors would not come up right. so i ended up taking them out and reseating them and I tried another render and it was about than an hour I think. all i know is I though it was odd to not wait for two days to render something.

If you can afford a GPU upgrade, you'd see a huge increase in performance. I'm saving my pennies for that right now myself.

Mine used to be like that so I upgraded my Ram to 28G and upgraded my two cpu chips and graphics card and it works pretty good now, although when I apply a crumplepop effect to a scene, the rendering goes from minutes to hours. I would like to in the near future swap my start up drive to solid state, that should kick my old circa 06/07 mac pro into gear for a bit longer.