In my experience using a computer to write, record & produce music I have learnt that dedicated, clean systems work far better (i.e. crash less!) than machines that are used for many tasks such as music, internet, gaming, & video

however it is a shame to fork out £2000+ for a sweet sweet new computer and not use it for music and similar tasks streaming media & graphics tasks.

does anyone have any comments on this topic? does anyone find the performance of their machine is much better when it is used solely for video work?

cheers

In theory (and sometimes in practice) doing multiple things with
your PC is no problem. Most of the time it is, why? Because people
(somehow) tend to use them as garbage cans. Install this, try
that software, uninstall it again. Etc. Primarely with games. This
indeed does not help your speed or stability. If you, however,
install sound applications and for example video applications to
both do sound and video editing and leave it at that, I doubt
you will have many problems (if you use a professional OS like
Windows 2000 or Windows XP).

You could test this ofcourse. Just install everything you need on
your machine and try it out. If it doesn't work you can always
buy another PC and split the things. Easy.

Ofcourse, you also need to take hardware into the equation. If
you have a fast CPU, lots of RAM and a fast harddisk (on a fast
bus not to forget!) you're less likely to run into problems.