One cool thing is to maybe purchase a program called Ghost from Symantec. That way once you get your new PC installed with all the software you want and have upgraded everything and verified "ALL" is well. You can create a backup with ghost so if anything does Crash down the road (which seems to be a fact of life for Windows users) you can restore your PC to "all is well" version.

I edit on my general purpose computer that I do most everything on. I have a dedicated drive that I capture my footage on other than that and the fact I defrag and wipe the capture drive after every project I do nothing special. Have never had a problem.

Most of my work takes place on a 1.3GHz T'bird Athlon with 512MB memory running XPpro. This is the same PC that I use for all my other uses (web, email, office, and the occasional game). At any one time I have at least 40 processes running in the background (as of this moment there are 55). Vegas doesn't care.

I have a disk caddy installed, and I can swap out 120GB drives in a matter of a minute or two.

Again, I have never had any instability and have never seen the need for a dedicated machine. Back in '98, my earlier PC struggled to keep up with DV rates, but not this machine. Never a dropped frame.

I'm the same as Bear. I have 2 80gb drives. the first one has Windows 98 and 2k on it, and all of my software (os, word processing, games, video editing, 3d, games, audio, games... you get the idea). The other HD is where I keep all my video files. I almost never have a crash, except in the case of Windows Explore. And THAT only started happening when I installed Explore 6 (anyone else have the same problem?)

My almost two year old P4 1.8Ghz began as all video and now is mostly video. I Have seperate NTFS-formatted drives for program, capture and render with removable drive caddies for more capturing when I need to work on several projects at once. IEEE-1394, DVD burner, USB scanner and everything on this same box. No games on this system, although I did go ahead and put web browser on there. At first it was an all-video computer, but, I found ASUS P4T and WIN2K to be so flexible that I just kept adding things. Still runs fine and never drops a frame. (knock on wood)

Because Windows XP is so stable I did everything on my Athlon 1800 (soon to get a P2.4). It was important to have my image-editing programs available, also to surf the web during long renders :).

ONe suggestion I have is if you plan to burn DVDs get a cheap box just for that. Because it's important not to have interruptions while burning I could never burn a DVD and do something else on the computer. Now I use the old 633Celeron for DVD burning while I go merrily about my business on the main computer. (I just compile the DVD in my authoring program to the hard drive, then spend 5 minutes copying the Video and Audio TS folders through a lan to the 633Celeron. After that if I want to make a dozen copies of a DVD I just put a new one in when the last one pops out).

If you have the money and space to dedicate a machine, that would be fine. I have had great luck with Dell computers and using a dual-boot system. First boot is the generic system for the whole family, alternate boot is Win2K set up for video editing. The other key element everyone has mentioned is installing a separate drive for capturing, editing, rendering. So for a reasonably low adder (Partition Magic + 2nd drive) you get a pretty versatile system.

One other item to check out is Acronis True Image. Unlike other disk imagers, it does the imaging in Windows (others reboot to DOS). You get a nice stable configuration going and then just image the whole thing to CD-R.

I think ericb hit upon one of the most efficient ways to assure that you video process runs without hiccups. Simply install a second OS (or second installation of the same OS) and dedicate it to video.

I have plenty of storage space on my machine (a modest 900 Ghz 128 MB Compaq) that I set up as a dual boot (winxppro/win98). I recently experienced some problems relating to a non-video app that I solved by installing a second instance of WinXP. Now, when I boot, I have a choice of two XP's or the Win98 OS.

That second XP installation is clean as a whistle - nothing there but programs installed on that OS. My computer doesn't know or care what else is installed on the other two OS's.

I really don't think you have to worry about what else is on your machine for Vegas, though. The only critical streaming processes are capture and print to tape. For those, you want to terminate other aps to be safe, and you should not have any problems.

Caruso

I think after reading everyone else's suggestions it kinda hit me. I built a dedicated pc because i was using premiere and win98. It (was) is such buggy software I had to do something to make it run optimally. Well, long story short, I had a choice to upgrade to 6.5 or find something else. I chose Vegas because of all the positive reviews and posts in this forum. Longer story shorter. I installed Vegas on my Dell Inspiron 8100 Laptop (2 months ago, win2k) I have got so much crap installed on the laptop and Vegas has yet to crash or cause any type of significant problems(unlike Premiere, even on a dedicated machine, I had problems) . It has run so smoothly. You really don't need a dedicated machine. It's a damn good piece of software(Vegas)!

I haven't been editing on a separate machine, but I tried to upgrade my 1.6Ghz P4 at the weekend by installing 2 x 120 Gb drives. It wouldn't boot with them in so I took it into the store and they looked at my machine and told me my power supply wouldn't handle any more drives. Also my case was too small and would cause overheating so I would need a new one. Then I decided to go the whole way and on Wed I pick up a 2.8Ghz P4 800 Mhz front side bus, 1Gb RAM, 320 Gb of drives, 5.1 sound, Matrox dual head graphics card and 2 x LCD screens. That should work quite nicely. What do you think?

I think it way more machine than Vegas requires, but wish you many hours of pleasant editing/rendering/printing with that machine. I'd also be curious to hear your review of how you feel that extra HP (horsepower, not Hewlitt Packard, LOL) enhances your Vegas experience.

I did not take note (and am not going back to review) what sort of CDRW burner came with your machine, but, I recently purchased a 2.5 Ghz machine for my office, and, for fun, bring it home on weekends. To my delight, I discovered that it had a 40x CD burner - not a feature I paid any attention to when I purchased it for office use (had to upgrade my lowly 233 Mhz machine in order to use Autocad). I was surprised to find that the drive will actually burn (accurately) at something approaching 40x.

I have an order for 200 cd's for a master that I completed for a client - this machine burned those cds for me in record time, although Vegas would not recognize the drive - neither did Steinberg's Wavelab 4.0. I have to use Nero - but that's painless.

I haven't spent any editing time with Vegas on this machine, but would expect to see better "real-time" previews from the timeline as a result of the added speed. I do not expect to see vastly reduced rendering times.

I remain curious what you find in your own experience. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Caruso

I pick the machine up in about 3 hours so I will post and let people know. I have a Ricoh DVD+RW burner which works well, but I will upgrade to Sony's new 510 burner as soon as it becomes available for the increased speed and the compatibility with -RW.

The main reason I want all of this HP (Horsepower - well CPU power really) is to get stable 25fps preview playback which I don't always get when editing AVI files. I never get it when I try to edit mpg2 files which I do most of the time. If I still don't get 25fps playback with mpg2 then I will convert all of my mpg to AVI and edit in native AVI mode. At least with the extra CPU power. this process will be quicker.

I'll post and let people know how it is going later today.

Well, configuring a new PC always takes longer than you think! It has gone very smoothly, but I still haven't had a chance to do much as I need to re-register Vegas and I haven't heard back from Customer Support yet. However, early indications are that this thing is screaming! I am quite comfortably doing a number of things simultaneously, including burning a large number of CDs on my DVD burner. I don't yet have all of my drives operating but I should have everything working like a charm in a few hours. More details as they come to hand....