I have previously used Pinnacle and Ulead's products to create year end slideshows and videos for my kids' high school sports. Those products are not anywhere close to PD 6 as far as ease of use, eye-catching transitions, menus, etc. I have mainly done slideshows with some embedded video for soccer, cross country and golf using PD 6. As long as you have lots of memory and a lots of GB hard drive space, then you shouldn't run into the frustrations that I had with the other products of the program crashing after you have been working on it for hours! Good luck!

How much memory are we talking? What os are you using?

I have a HP Media Center PC with Windows XP. 1.5 GB RAM and 270 GB Hard drive with an additional removable hard drive. I know it pales in comparision with some of you pros out there, but it works well with what I need it to do. The video really takes up lots of hard drive space and I have lots of music files on my hard drive to use with the slide & video projects. I also only use this computer to do video & slide show editing and not for everyday use. I have read on this forum and heard lots of horror stories with compatibility with Vista so I'm in no hurry to upgrade yet. Hope that helps.

I will be dual booting xp pro and vista and experimenting with both. I don't know for sure if it is compatible with xp 64 and vista 64, so if anyone on here can tell me if it is or not, I would greatly appreciate it.
I will have (depending on whether I use 64 bit) at least 3gb of memory and 3 500gb hard drives plus 2 esata 500gb external backup hdd. That should be sufficient I would think.
As for speed I will have the Q6600 oc to 2800 or more. So I think I should be set for that, it is just now to find out if 64 bit will work to determine my memory amount.