Blender 2.69 is the one you want to use. It works. It's got a bit of a learning curve, but there are a lot of excellent tutorials on YouTube (Blender Guru(Andrew Price, just awesome), Blender for Noobs, BornCG, plenty of others, but those are what I used/use. Best of all, it's free and extremely powerful.
MAME Cab PC: i7 4770@3.4Ghz (passmark 9945), 12GB RAM, Win 8.1/64, GeForce GTX645 (passmark 1898); Shiny new laptop: i7 4800MQ@2.7Ghz (passmark 8586), 16GB RAM, Win 8.1/64, GeForce GTX870M (passmark 3598); Old laptop: i5@2.3Ghz, 8GB RAM, Win 7/64, Intel 3000 graphics