If I can butt in here/help out...
I don't think Mike meant an external hard drive. That said, it's difficult to buy an off-the-shelf system with two internal hard drives - although I'm sure e.g. Dell would build you one like that. Internal hard drives are generally preferred because of faster transfer speeds - external are fine for archiving stuff, but not for capturing.
Re graphics cards: at the higher end of the market, you're right, you usually get a separate graphics card with its own dedicated memory rather than a graphics chip on the mother board that shares system memory. As Mike said, for basic video editing - which would include using Premiere - you really don't need a separate card, but if your system of choice has one, that's fine. But no need to change it.
Re Firewire: yup, you just need the one Firewire port for connecting your camcorder to, although, as you imply, two could be better if you thought you might ever get an external hard drive. That said, USB 2.0 works just as well with the kind of apps you'd use an external drive for.
RE: Home vs. Pro - not sure why Mike recommended the latter - I'll be interested to hear. generally, Pro is a better networking OS but I'm not aware of much else that it has that would make it a better video editing platform.
Good luck...
Premiere Pro, Encore, Photoshop, Ulead VS6, WXP Pro, Core 2 Duo, 2GB, 2 x 250GB SATA3 drives, 2 x 250GB USB 2 external drive, DVD writer, GeForce 7300 GS 256MB
The biggest fool can ask questions that the wisest man cannot answer...
Bookmarks