KEK, it sounds OK to me but keep in mind I'm something of a newbie, myself. So I may be wrong, but the machine you have in mind is hotter than mine, and mine seems to work fine.

You do realize you'll need more than 74 GB to hold 20 hours of video, right? Figure 13 GB per hour of video, and ideally the video is NOT on your system drive but stored on a separate drive or drives.

Sounds about $200 - $300 too high. Lots of systems can be had for around that with LCD - I just had some custom builds in the Shuttle cases - same configs and cost me about $1700 with 17" LCD -

Mike

Is there a company you recommend for such a purchase?

KEK, mine's a Dell.

Not sure what you can get from them nowadays for the price you mentioned, or how it should ideally be configured, but I have to say I've been pretty satisfied with the machine. My last one was a Dell, too. This one runs Vegas with no problems.

I know Boxx has a good reputation with Vegas, heres a link:

http://www.boxxtech.com/products/configurator.asp?ModelSeriesID=104

Boxx

The machine you describe will certainly do the trick, but then so will a machine with one-third the horsepower. There are people on this Board who have CPUs under 1GHz that do a great job with Vegas. Similarly, 1GB of ram is overkill by about a factor of 3, but then what the heck, if you want it, it certainly isn't going to slow the system down--it just won't make any difference.

So I guess what I'm saying is that the new proposed system is way, way more than what is needed, but if you want it, go for it. As for the glitches on your current system, there could be many factors, but they are unrelated to basic system horsepower. Perhaps some virus scan is starting up, or a scheduled disk defrag, or whatever.

DawBox.com Built mine. Justin Lynch put it together for me. I started using computers to record audio and sequence midi. I've got a P4 2.8gig 1 gig ram box that runs Sonar. That puppy hums fine as wine. But when it came time to add video to my set up I got Justin (did my Sonar sys) to do a custom build AMD 64 3000+, 1 gig ram ATI aiw 9600 video card 120gig Seagate OS drive and 160 gig sg video drive. This has Vegas5 and SoundForge6 installed. A Maudio audiophile soundcard for audio and it is sweat. All this for $1400. These guys know there stuff. If your looking give them a shout. They build these audio/video DAW's for a living. And these systems are tweaked to do the job. My 2 systems are offline which keeps things simple. But complicates the registration process :)+)

Just two little details:
For application "as is", 1Go of RAM may be overkill, but for me, since I use very much often Dynamic RAM preview the more is the better. I like to check out my "tricky parts" in production as I progress through my editing so if I could have 3Go, I would certainly take it.

Second point: concerning the external monitor you'd like to have on your system. When I bought my laptop, it was specified it could give me an external monitor but the little thing I didn' t check for was being sure that it allowed me to have it as a *second* screen, I mean not a duplicate of my laptop screen but an extended desk. And it is not, so if I had to go for a laptop again, I'd try to find one that gives me that option. But the thing is; I don't even know if it exists.
Having the option of being able to undock some windows to a second screen has become more than a must to me...
Oh, and check out the specs concerning resolution your graphic card can handle. I got a 1024x768 and if I go out to this external 21" monitor, I can't have 1600x1200 nor even 1280x1024 so it's more of a "geatrics" thing than an actual "plus"... downer cause actually, I don't have any gain.

Two personnal choices but I still wanted to point out just in case.

Good luck and I wish you the best you can find!