System Tweaks

Tweaking your system for video editing

• The following are useful, video-specific tweaks for improving the performance of your system. Some of the paths may vary slightly between various versions of Windows.
• If you have two hard drives on your system, install the software on your system drive (usually C:) and capture video to your other drive (usually D:).
• Your display card shouldn't use too much of your resources just to provide you with overlay. Right-click on your desktop, select Properties>Settings. Lower your color depth to "High Color (16-bit)", and set your screen resolution to 1024x768. You might want to disable some of the high-end 3D gaming features, which have no bearing on video display.
• Make sure DMA is enabled: Select Control Panel, System>Device Manager. Select IDE Controller>Primary/ Secondary>Advanced, and make sure DMA is selected on each of your drives.
• Disable "Write-Behind Caching" on the hard drive used for video capture. Go Control Panel>System, right click on your hard drive, select Properties, and make sure Write Caching is DISabled.
  
• Change the values of your Paging File (Swap File) size in Control Panel>System> Advanced>Virtual Memory. Set the minimum and maximum values to twice your amount of RAM. So if you have 256Mb of RAM, set both your minimum and maximum paging file limits to 512.

NOTE: after each of these tweaks, restart your computer and make sure it is running OK before proceeding to the next one.
For an exhaustive list of Version-specific tweaks for Windows, please visit the excellent http://www.videoguys.com/Windows_Tips.html