I have had really good luck using this setup for editing and I figured I'd pass it along:
If your PC has the ability to use more than 1 GB of RAM, fill it up and GET A RAM DISK PROGGY.
http://www.arsoft-online.de/products/product.php?id=1
You can get a freeware RAM Disk driver at this link.
Why? I set this up on my win 2000 PC with 1.5 GB RAM and it positively beats the PANTS off ANY hard drive you can find for throughput. I did a test on my machine with RAM disk vs. hard disk and the results were dramatic. Normalizing a 80 minute set of 16/44.1 took 2 minutes 30 seconds without RAM Disk, with 1 GB RAM Disk it took 1 minute 10 seconds.
1 GB of RAM is not that expensive, either. Maybe $150 if you get 2 sticks of 512 MB.
and all you have to do is point your software to the ram disk as the swap or data location and it doesn't know the difference.
E-mail me at jmnospam@adelphia.net if you have any detailed Q's.
good info. just don't have enough ram
check with your pc manufacturer or motherboard manufacturer that the system you have can hold that much ram...many of the HP/Dell/Compaq systems are limited to the amount you can have