Choppy video/sound, and burn time?

[lancers]

Hi, I could use some help!
I'm capturing DV video from a Panasonic NVGS1 camcorder (DV out only) to my laptop, a Dell Inspiron 5100, using VS 8. The PC is P4 2.8GHz, 512Mb RAM, 60Gb HDD and a 8x DVD+R burner.
The captured video and sound is sometimes choppy in places. I've tried using DV type 1&2 but there appears to be no difference (which should I use BTW?).

I suspect the speed of the HDD may be the problem, am I likely to cure this by buying an external 7200rpm HDD?

It also takes an age (about 3hrs) to render and burn a 1 hour DVD. Is this normal?

Thanks in advance for any assistance, and merry Christmas to everyone!

[sjj1805]

Lancers

Please view the following links:
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=27
and
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=8959

Why an external drive? surely an internal drive would be better even if only to prevent extra clutter at your workstation. Your system specs look OK but I think you could do with a bit of extra RAM. I am sure you will notice a difference if you fit an extra 512mb to bring you up to 1GB.

Try rendering a video and whilst it is working press the following 3 keys all at the same time to bring up the windows task manager

ctrl-alt-del

Now look at the "performance" tab to see how much RAM is being used.