Nothing wrong with that PC at all. The video card is ok. At some point if you get into using effects like Magic Bullet you might want to consider a card that they recommend to get faster rendering of their effects, but the ATI card is fine otherwise.

And 1GB is more than plenty. I'm running all the current SONY software on PCs with 1GB and 384MB and it runs just as smoothly on either one.

Chienworks, 1 GB is on the edge of what's acceptable with DV projects (especially if you are running Vista instead of XP which requires more RAM for itself). You will be swapping in and out sooner or later, and that's never good.

And you need at least 2 GBs if you use or want to use in the future HDV.

Before following general statements about how much memory is enough it is a good idea to go into Task Manager, add the "Page Faults" column to the processes tab, and see if you are getting lots of page faults. If VMS isn't faulting that much then adding memory will have little if any effect on performance.

Paging, swapping, page faulting, whatever you want to call it, is normal and an expected behavior of a virtual memory operating system. As long as it isn't spinning out of control then you are doing fine and can save your money for something else.

Before upgrading to 3 GBs of RAM for my video station, I was swapping like crazy with my HDV projects and VMS. That was NOT acceptable *at all*. We are talking about 10-15 seconds to register a click. This is not in the realm of 'acceptable', unless you can spend a week for an hour's job.

The swap is there ONLY so that the OS doesn't crash if you run out of RAM. The swap should NOT be used as a substitute for less RAM. The time you will spend waiting for things to get done, is money that you can use to buy an extra GB.

I am a developer btw, and I am one of the reporters at OSNews.com, an operating system geek news site. I've been dealing with concepts like these since forever, so I know what I am talking about. And being married to an OS kernel engineer always helps of course.

Well, let's see ... right now on a machine with 1GB of RAM i've got two DV streams rendering to MPEG2 and another project made up of 1200 1920x1080 stills rendering to HD, as well as a browser, photo editor, Sound Forge, VidCap, and a sprinkling of utilities open. I've still got 551,136KB (over half a GB) of physical memory free. True, i'm using XP not Vista, but Vista isn't *that* much more RAM hungry.

Paging? Nice concept. Hardly ever see it here.

Ok, that's impossible. XP itself needs a minimum of 200 MBs for itself these days. And all the other apps need quite a bit of RAM too including the renderings. There is no way you have 550 MBs free. Absolutely no way. I would need 2 GBs to do all that, and I do run XP btw, not Vista. I wouldn't even need to read the Task Manager for that. My PC would just be unusable, registering clicks many seconds afterwards.

Eugenia, I now run VMS with only 512MB, and that is just fine, EXCEPT when I use large picture files (5MB jpegs) in my movie. For some reason, VMS starts reading cach a lot and makes me wait - like you - for 15 seconds after a click.

Eugenia, you must have something else running on your PC you haven't accounted for. Everything here is running smoothly with rapid response. And i defintely have that much RAM free as i was able to start up another Vegas session, allocate about 350MB of RAM to dynamic preview, and fill it. All the other applications were still running as smooth and quickly as ever. No swapping happening here.

My machine is similar to Chienworks, with 1GB, XP. After my BIOS fix, VMS is now very slick, even with several other apps running.

Which PC is it? Sound intresting. I need an up grade.

Maybe it is just an artifact of the HD work that Eugenia is doing.

Btw, the last time I checked, my pretty complicated > 1 hour project (multiple composited video tracks, tons of stills, color correction, fades, overlays, transitions, panning, fly-ins, etc.) was humming along just fine in VMS using less than 1gb of VM. (I have 1.5 gb of physical memory.) The only thing I ever felt I could use more of was CPU speed (well, OK, I can always use more disk space).

Btw, I think it is silly to try to completely avoid page files. Lots of VM is rarely touched and thus pointless to try and retain in memory. Oh, and I did operating system support for about a decade (TOPS-10/20 and VMS -- yes, the operating system named VMS), starting in the early days of true VM systems (the early 1980s), so I have a pretty good grounding in these concepts. Computer software is how I make a living; video is a hobby for me.