I'd stick with vegas 7d (or e) and get to work, there's just too much wrong with 8 right now.

You'll be debating back and forth here with sony fans ...and maybe you'll find some resolve to get ya by...but I just think you'd be more happy and content using 7 until Sony get's their sh8t together with 8 (which may be near never at this rate).

Def getyourself at least 1 or more fast, large sata or ide drive(s) to work with (didn't see that mentioned).
With SD video and utilizing .png for images, you really shouldn't have too many probs with 8.

First, when you initially import media, it has to be scanned and peak files have to be built which takes time, not to mention the type of file used. I find that M2T files take the longest to load. Your machine is underpowered in terms of memory so the time needed to build the files and load will be longer.

You are most certainly running into memory problems with other programs running at the same time. If you bring one of those background programs forward (such as IE), Vegas will then become a background program and have some memory stolen from it, which of course knocks your media off line.

I have 8 gig ram and when I watch task manager performance while rendering, it's not uncommon to see Vegas chew up at least 3.5gigs. Just today I did a render (uncompreassed avi at 1920x1080 and memory usage was at a pretty steady 2.93 gigs. And if your doing slide shows with still pics, then the memory REALLY gets eaten

You can check your page file and see if it is being managed by XP (or Vista as the case may be). Try doing a manual pagefile setting: set the minimum at 3gig and the maximum at 3 gig. This will set a steady and constant pagefile that is not self adjusting all the time. But until you bone up on the memory I would try to avoid running to many other programs at the same time. I take it your processor is not a quad core either.... which helps tremendously while trying to run other tasks.

and all this on one hard drive?

Yes i need to upgrade to a bigger hard drive. im thinking atleast 500GB

I'd stick with vegas 7d (or e) and get to work, there's just too much wrong with 8 right now.

they had vegas STUDIO 7 & now have 8 pro.

odds are whatever files you're importing are needing decoding. DV files work best & then normally performance drops as you add more compression (i've found uncompressed files render faster then DV but playback slower). I'm betting you're pulling a bunch of videos off digital camera & downloaded off the internet, that would cause vegas to hang for a few minutes if it had to load a lot of those up.

Your computer should be just fine. I've edited quite a bit with much less then that with no issues. The only issues you'll have with that much memory is if you have lots of images or HD. Normally I have several memory hogs open with vegas: Gimp & a 3d game/program I'd pull images/renders from. Never had any issues when I had even 512mb memory in Vegas 6. No issues with V8 & 1gb when I did that.

Unless you're upgrading to a duel core, don't bother with the extra CPU. If you have a duel core (besides a pentium D) then it could be the hard drive. Another, separate drive would help. Separate as in not on the same IDE chain as the 1st drive or an optical drive (SATA doesn't matter). External are normally slower then internal too, I use external's just fine though (normally I store the vid's on an internal drive & keep my misc stuff like SFX, images, veg's, etc. on the external).

Yes i need to upgrade to a bigger hard drive. im thinking atleast 500GB
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Actually, you really want to "add" more hd's. A nice simple setup for you might be: all apps/os on C: then 2 or more large-fast hard drives to store/work with media.

Unless your c drive is rather old/slow...in which case upgrade that too (again: apps/os, etc on C: - add more physical drives for media).

Also make sure your killing any auto starting progs (see start/run/msconfig and start/run/services.msc for a good start on that.

they had vegas STUDIO 7 & now have 8 pro.
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Yeah I know, I'd say to that (since they bought vegas 8), go get Vegas 7 (call sony support?) and utilize 7d or e until sony gets 8 together (or "if").
Because to me foremost is the best stability and ease of getting work done, espec over the features of 8 (which ain't wowing me so far).

I don't think throwing money at this is a good idea without knowing what's going on, and there's every chance that what you really need to do is get a different camera instead of a new computer.

Starting with the problem of vegas being slow to come back to life when you go use another program, there's a preference in Vegas that tells it not to close media files when it loses focus. By default Vegas closes all the files and this lets you edit them in another application while Vegas is still running. Set it not to close files and it'll come back to life much quicker. (There's been a thread on this over the last few days.)

That'll solve about 25% of the problem. The rest of it probably has to do with the type of media you're dropping on the timeline. Some media types are very efficient on the timeline, others are not. DV and HDV are generally good bets.

Rob Mack

good advice too.
But he is kinda hinting he's using a single drive...that can't be fun.

The quick way to see if a hard drive will help is use a USB memory stick (assuming you have USB 2.0) and use that as a second drive. Open up task manager and see what is going on.