crashing computer help please

[do6151 0]

Im not sure if anyone can help me but anyway i went and baught an adaptec firewire card for my laptop. I can now get the footage from the HC 40 to my cpu. Now my problem is my computer keeps locking up even when im just playing the video threw my cpu from the camera.. It works for a little bit then locks up. Some details i have a dell Insperon 4150 pentium 4 1.7gh, 512 meg ram, 16 meg of video ram, ati mobility radeo 7500, it doesnt matter if i use adobe premier or windows movie maker its still locks up. Please help anyone.

[cvfd1399 0]

Probbaly your 16mb of video ram is not enough?

[silvere 0]

I would suggest to update your video card drivers. http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/type.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&SystemID=INS_PNT_P4N_4150&category=6&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=2552&devlib=6

[nacmacfeegle 0]

Is that a 1.7 gig hard drive?

Not nearly enough.

Try a few things that might help...
Partition your HD so that you have a huge space on a separate drive for your footage, etc. Make sure premiere also stores its temp and preview files there.
Download a wee application from Canopus called raptest http://www.canopus.us/US/products/free_utilities/pm_free_utilities.asp It will test your system for HD read write speed amongst other things, actually it tests your system's compatibility with a raptor card, but I digress....

Find (google and download) and run enditall, it will safely stop other processes that may be making your system run slow.

Only use Premiere etc when you are not running anything else, not the CD, not internet, absolutely nothing else.....

Defrag your H/D, and upgrade to a dedicated (for a laptop, probably external firewire connected) Hard drive for video storage.

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He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

[do6151 0]

no its not a 1.7 g hard drive i have a 60 gig hard hrive.

[PhreeZone 20]

Quote

Partition your HD so that you have a huge space on a separate drive for your footage, etc.

No, don't do that. It only slows it down. Partitioning the drive makes the heads have to be in 2 places at once (one to run the OS and one to access your files) which just leads to slowing the access time down a lot. A far far better thing to do is to run your scratch disk as a physically seperate drive. That way drive 2 can be compliling the preview with drive 1 is doing its OS tasks.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[nacmacfeegle 0]

"No, don't do that. It only slows it down."

I beg to differ, but am not going to argue, its not the Corner.
I was getting dropped frames on my lappie till I partitioned, now its working fine, also, a long time ago my custom built desktop came with its HD partitioned, it was built by a company that only makes editing stations (DVC in Brighton).
It may seem counter intuitive, but is recommended by some smart people.
Of course, a separate pysical drive helps, as you rightly point out, and it may be that the current disc is simply wrongly configured or even too slow anyways, hence my recommendation to run raptest to check read/write speeds.

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He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

[do6151 0]

Thanks for everyones help but i figured it out. It was a combanation hardware conflick and old display driver.

Thanks