The last DVD I created took 22 hours to make (files saved to hard disk, not burn to DVD). The PC is an Athlon 64 3500+, Asus A8V motherboard, IDE 200GB hard drive for video, IDE 160GB hard drive for operating system, 2GB RAM, etc etc etc.

I've decided that this is too long to be practical, so I'm upgrading the PC. I have a quad core Phenom 9500 processor and mother board on the way, 500GB SATA hard drive, 4GB 1066 MHz DDR2 RAM on the way to take care of things.

This PC will be pretty much dedicated to video and photo editing. The video editing software I have on hand is Premiere Elements 4.0. I'm a novice, so I'm not experienced with full-blown Premiere Pro.

I have no desire to become any kind of pro at this, this is just for home movies really.

This gets me to my real question: Will Premiere Elements 4.0 work OK with XP 64?

Premiere elements 4 works with Windows XP or anything higher.

I'm running Premiere Elements 7 on a Vista 64 box. Works fine.

I have a Quad core running at 3.4ghz - encoding a Home DVD with menus takes less than 30 mintues(for about one hour of standard DV video)

// Lazze

This gets me to my real question: Will Premiere Elements 4.0 work OK with XP 64?

My experience with XP64 was a disaster in general. I never tried premiere elements but I highly recommend going to Vista-64. I was able to remove all the Vista crap and turn it back into XP in about 3 days of googling. Now all my apps work.

I've been working with this rig for a while now, and for the most part it's going well.

The first time I installed x64 on this rig something went wrong, I think from downloading the latest drivers from nVidia rather than xfx-force.com (the mother board manufacturer). I don't know what xfx did unusual, but the nVidia nForce drivers weren't stable on this mobo. Another mistake I made was to go ahead with Microsoft's recommendation of installing MS Search 4.0- BIG MISTAKE. I've learned that it has been causing problems on every XP machine I own. Eventually, this one update was causing the PC to crash so soon after a reboot that I couldn't even make changes on the PC.

I reformatted & re-installed XP, declined the install of MS Search 4.0, and the machine seems to be very, very stable. I've thrown a battery of stability tests at it, including memtest and that prime number generator test, and all is well.

I can now compile a 3 hour SD home movie in less than three hours- not the 22 hours it took me on the old system. Fantastic!!!

I have taken the advice you guys have given, and dedicate this PC to video and photo editing. I don't have the latest software, but so far, functionality is good enough for what I'm doing. I won't be winning any awards except from my family and model train club- plenty good 'nuff for me.