will more memory help Vegas render faster?

[clang]

My 3-year-old laptop (a pentium M 2Ghz processor with 1Gb of RAM) running Windows XP and Vegas 8.0c is very slow at rendering anything complicated (e.g. lots of layers and effects) - yesterday it took 1.5 hrs to render a 3 minute film!

I'm very aware this is not a very grunty machine by today's standards, but rather than buying a whole new machine, would simply upgrading the memory by 2 Gb help with rendering? Or is rendering speed more limited by processor speed?

 

[Hidef1080]

Memory can help but I think Vegas is more about the CPU.

A 2.0 core dou could handle HDV and SD but a single, class 2.0 is kinda slow for SD and I don't think it could deal with HDV very well.
I've edited SD Digital 8 on a 1.8 Pentium in the old days so it can be done but I know it never took me an hour and a half for 3 minutes of video.... I had 2 gigs of RAM and Adobe Premiere Elements.

If I had a 2Ghz Pentium today, I'd give it 3 to 4 gigs of RAM which can help overall but I'm not sure if you'll see increases in Vegas.

What camera are you using?

 

[andy mace]

more memory always helps but to speed up render times you need more processor. What my laptop takes 2 hours to do my quad core desktop does in 15 minutes. The difference is astounding.

 

[Efexone]

In your case, a memory upgrade might help a lot. check your processor utilization in the task manager during renders. If its only peaking at around 50%, you have a memory bottle neck.

When I used to edit HDV on a p4, 3.2 ghz, I ran into this problem. I installed another gig of memory (2gig total) and my proc shot up to 100% during renders - cut the render times by a third.

In any case, a pentium M is not good for video editing in general. I'd ditch it and buy a fresher machine if you want to see a real performance upgrade.