Hi, I'm moving from hobbiest to something a little more serious and want to upgrade my editing gear. I've looked at some turnkey systems (You know, prepackaged and ready to go, with all the hardware and software loaded), but I'm not sure this is the best deal.

My questions are:

1. Are turnkeys the way to go, if you have $5k?

2. If so, can anybody recommend a system?

Thanks in advance.

My personal take on this, is that the do all the shakeing down for you. You have less chance of there being hardware/software conflicts, PLUS support. When you build your own, you are on your own. It took me close to a year to work out a bug with my Motherboard.

If you use Vegas, it's unlikely that you're going to run into hardware incompatibility issues (as opposed to Avid/Mojo, or Premiere Pro, which are more hardware dependent).

2- If you want something easy, a Mac system might be around the same price. And OS X is very user friendly, and you don't really have to worry about viruses or spyware and you're not going to have to mess around with your system as much.