do tell Orcatek.....

Personally, i almost always set Vegas priority to below normal while rendering. This allows my computer to be much more responsive to other tasks i might want to do while the rendering is taking place in the background. As long as i don't do anything else extremely processor intensive, Vegas still gets 99% of the processor cycles most of the time so the render still finishes in about the same amount of time.

As a corollary, since Vegas gets most of the processor cycles anyway (assuming you're not doing anything else extremely processor intensive), setting it to a higher priority would give Vegas 99% of the cycles instead of ... 99%. So there wouildn't be any huge benefit. By setting a higher priority you might shave a few seconds off the rendering time at the cost of making your computer almost unsuable for anything else while rendering.

If you can't mutitask while Vegas is running or your system becomes very sluggish and none responsive that's a tip off you may not have enough memory for the applications you typically run TOGETHER.

I have 1 GB of RAM and I can easily run Photoshop, Flash, Vegas, Word, Excel, (the first three can all be resource hogs) my newsreader application all at once without losing any zip.

If you have Windows XP, bring up Task Manager and watch the performance tab WHILE you're doing various tasks at once. It will show you if or not your memory and paging file needs improvement.

Assuming XP or 2000 there are alot of standard services that start that you may not need. Shutting them off saves memory and CPU. Such as Alerter, IIS Admin, Messenger, Telephony, Terminal Services, windows tiem, world wide web publishing to name a few - you need to know your environement as there are several others that are candidates also.

Set-up automatic disk defrags to run nightly or at least weekly.

Set low and high settings for swap file to the same number (generally twice physical memory). This prevents the system from trying to resize on the fly. And if you ideally you want to get it defragged - this is more complicated but can be worth it if yours is in bad shape.

No desktop wallpapers.

Turn off all your little helper apps that auto install. Such as quicktime, realplayer, disk detector, various IM programs.

XP you can turn off themes, switch to clear type font smoothing, Turn off the visual effects.

There are several sites for tweaking the various versions of windows.

Along the same line of thought there can be lots of stuff going on that you may not be aware of. While Task Manager can show you some details in later versions of Windows, there are several little applications that can give more details.

For example Process Explorer (free) will show how many handles each process is using along with what DLL's it uses, CPU resources and so on. Another sometimes useful little applet called File Monitor will report all file system activity.

I had a cute little automated screen saver from ScreenShots that changed the screen saver every day. Problem was I didn't know it constantly queried to see if it was time to change the picture. This caused a drain on resouces, that I wouldn't have known unless I brought up File Monitor and saw all the stupid activity.