I'll second the memory upgrade suggestion. I just added a gig on top of my 512 and it helped tremendously. Apparently disk-swapping was occuring at times I hadn't realized, as well as the times when it was very obvious. Vegas consistently eats 300MB of RAM for me so the 512 was a bit tight.

- Jason

I'm interested to know exactly What were the benefits you observed from boosting your memory?
Playback? Render time? Preview size/smoothness? Something else?

We all want to "get better" performance. What did you find?

For me, while previewing, Vegas would sometimes stutter and pause (one frame of video frozen for a while) when the cursor reached the edge of the screen and had to paint a new screen of waveforms and thumbnails. There were also occasions when simply moving down the timeline, requiring the same re-painting, would cause delays.

Disk swapping delays are relatively lengthy so eliminating this problem made the whole experience much nicer.

My recent projects have incorporated a lot of panning on stills along with video, which seems to require more memory. Other kinds of projects may not see the same degree of benefit from added memory.

- Jason

Additional RAM beyond 512 won't help performance. If your system hangs or pauses, that could be an indication your paging or swap file is corrupt or badly fragemented. Check Windows Help to learn how to defrag your system files.

While a dual processor system is somewhat faster, don't look for a huge performace boost. What I've done and suggest it highly is build a dedicated system for rendering which frees up your main system for editing. Switch files via rack mounted drives. While the second system is rendering project "A" you can be working on project "B" on the other machine.

If you figure in the cost of a new processor, a new system board, more ram, and the new upgraded power supply you'll probably need to drive a dual processor system, for a few hundred more you can throw in a hard drive, graphic card and case and have a second system. If you don't have a second monitor, a small one can be had very cheaply today.

Vegas is multi-threaded but doesn't take FULL advantage of multiple processors. (very few program really do!)

For inexpensive improvements, I suggest more ram...the most your system can handle. Two benifits here...1: Allows for longer or more complex preview to ram. 2: Helps the processor gobble of more data, faster.

Shut down any TSR's that are running that you don't need. The computer handling your editing should do just that...very liitle more.

Get the fastest video card you can afford. This will at least allow the screen to keep up as the timeline moves. It will also help your preview window keep up with multiple tracks of video. Remember, most processors have to wait for a video card to finish a job before they can move on, so any of the newer video cards with their DDR ram and processors on board, will handle requests much faster, freeing up the main processor to move on. An NVidea type card with 250mghz processor and 64megs ram is about $125....cheap!

BTW, the second processor won't hurt, it will help...but make sure your motherboard ram requirements for the second chip are covered.

David

Thanks guys these are all good suggestions...
FYI - the system I use is only used for video and I don't have any other programs running in the background. I run a utilty that kills any active apps before I start using vegas. I've dissabled most of the non-necessary windows services too. My video card is a Matrox G400.

I'm thinking I might just hold off until I can build a completely new box...

What utility turns off other programs? Sounds like a good thing. Will it run on XP?