How best to upgrade my PC?

[blue_d]

I have booked a "holiday of a life time" and will be buying a digital camcorder to capture it. But before that I wanted to know how much - or what - to spec up my home build PC.

Current system;
Athlon XP2400+
256Mb DDR RAM
GeForce2 *onboard* graphics and sound
Windows ME

I do not have firewire so that ones definately on my list to buy.

Second on my list is a quieter CPU Fan, and possibly replace my noisy (and slightly dodgy) generic power supply unit - its all a bit loud.

An extra 256mb RAM would presumably be high on the list, and not too expensive.

Thats when I loose the priority - and I cant afford everything! My options would seem to be Windows XP Home, a graphics card, or a better firewire card rather than the cheapest I can find (which is what I would go with, left to my own devices!)

What do you think? - Bearing in mind that I dont plan on spending the rest of my life editing video - just the occasional holiday! :P

[blue_d]

Ooops forgot to say - I have a 60gig 7200 HD, with one of the three 20gig partitions free - although if needed I could repartition and get at least 30 to 35gig in the free partition.

Thanks!

[Alan Mills]

Defintitely get upgrade to Windows XP and def get more RAM. If you have the pennies I'd get more than 0.5 GB RAM. My system often goes over 0.5 GB used when editing video.

More hard disk space would not go amiss either. Remember, 1GB of disk will hold about 5 minutes of raw video capture. You'll need work space for editing too. I'll let you do the sums

A firewire card is a must for the transfer. I'm not sure if you need more than the 'cheap' card you were thinking about. I bought a combo card from dabs.com for my transfers. It has two firewire ports and three USB2 ports on the same card for about £18 + delivery. I've now got some USB2 ports in case i ever need them. Works fine so far. Then again, I've never had an expensive firewire card so might not know what I'm missing.

As for a new graphics card. For the odd bit of editing, I'm not coinvinced it's necessary. Let me know if I'm wrong anyone, but unless you want to spend real money on a realtime rendering card you'll not really gain anything.

HTH

Alan

[Marc Peters]

The great thing about the recent releases of both Premiere and Vegas is REAL TIME editing without the need for any hardware acceleration. So all you need is a bog standard Firewire card combined with a mid range video editing application for RT editing.

On the other hand, buying a dedicated video editing card often means you get Premiere for free anyway.