Swede,

Your processor is fast enough, but you might benefit from more RAM (particularly if you use RAM previews). More knowledgeable folks will chime in here.

The other thing you might consider is that because DV takes up about 13 gigs per hour, your 40 GB drive might fill up surprisingly quickly, depending on what kind of editing you anticipate.

G

"I would also look at firewire (a must for DV editing) with a healthy external drive at 7200 Rpm. These drives are now under $300 for a 120 gig."

Yes, I will buy a firewire, but do I really need one more harddrive (external)?

Is not the drive I already have, enough? Because I think I want to store my films on DV-tape's and not on the drive.

You could probably get by with a 40GB drive, if your projects aren't too long and don't have too much source footage, and you send every project to DV and clean it out from your drive before startin the next one. But drives are not too expensive, I got a 120GB drive for $140.

As for RAM, I've only got 640MB and Vegas runs fine, I never hear the disk paging stuff in and out. I guess more memory would help with RAM previews though.

Another 256MB of ram would be benefical.
Do yourself a favor and add a 120 gig 7200rpm HD (internal). Use the 40gig as the system drive. Partition the 120 as a video drive and a data drive. I'm running a 40 gig system drive, a 60 gig data drive, a 60 gig multimedia storage drive ( for audio files and completed mpeg videos), and a 120 gig video drive for all video editing files. Remember that to produce the final video, VV will produce many "render .avi files that are output to the camcorder. My last project ( 2 hours of video showing 10 hiking trips) rendered over 500 files. It is no fun to see "Disk Full" error after rendering for several hours!

Don't edit any video on a drive with less than 7200 rpm spindle speed. You won't be happy when the video stutters.

1st off, really couldn't resist so please forgive... is the light on?

Seriously though, computers are like cars - they will only go as fast as your wallet. Adding RAM is cheap currently, and even though it's questionable, open to debate how much of a boost you will get, it's worth the little cash you'll shell out, especially since the 256 you've got is almost the minimum just to run winxp well.

Upgrading to xp pro might help, as you've more control over stuff you can turn off, which in my experience is kind of critical just to get the OS working properly. Might find it cheaper to buy an OEM version install rather then upgrade. Either way consider going here: http://www.blackviper.com/index.html

Regarding hard drives, never have too much space. Buy what you can - right now 120 meg drives seem a sweet spot between price/capacity, but 160's will be there soon enough. External versus internal is an open debate I'll leave alone as all sorts of issues, convenience & technical, make it a longer discussion. I will say it seems to be cheaper to buy an enclosure or case & add your own hard drive then buy something pre-packaged.

Using your system drive for editing etc. works - just not as well. The emphasis on separate drives comes from wanting the greatest throughput reading or writing data. You do have to get the video in somehow, unless you're doing audio of course. You mention DV tape storage, so I assume a DV camera, which means a firewire card - don't know availability in your locale, but these start at about $15 shipped if you forgoe the brand name.