I just picked up a new system to replace my fragile old Dell 1.6 P4 system. You can check my computer details for specifics. I did a TMPGEnc encode to compare with my old box and it seems I'm not getting much faster encoding with the dual processors like I should be. I'm getting slightly faster times, but I'm not seeing both processors going to 100% like the single P4 did when doing encodes. Is the system reserving processor power for something? The two get to about 60% each.

I'm also having trouble getting the same codecs onto my new system as I had on the old one. TMPGEnc won't upgrade to 2.5 Plus (which I paid for) and I can't remember how I set it up on the old box as I updated to the latest version recently. No way to enter my registration key from the program while in the trial period either? It's also crashing when trying to encode directly from a VOB, but I think it may be an MPEG2 issue as it also happened when trying to encode an MPEG1 to MPEG2. Maybe I need to see if I've got an MPEG2 codec installed?

The reason I haven't installed all my codec packs is because I've heard rumors that the Nemo pack causes some troubles. I know somewhere along the line my old PC stopped showing thumbnails of MPEG videos. Everything else had thumbs but not MPEG. Those help some when trying to organize.

My last question is about RAID. I got a RAID controller for free and I'm wondering what to do with it. I've got an 80GB HDD for my primary boot drive and for all my programs. I have a secondary drive for storage and DV projects. I'm wondering if using a RAID feature like striping if it'll effectively increase my write speeds and make capturing/encoding go more smoothly. I guess it would only help if my capture/encoding program was able to run faster than a single drive. I was thinking of getting 2 120GB drives for my RAID card to use. Though can RAID also utilize two burners (CD or DVD) to write the same image to both drives at once? Burning two discs at once would be handy.

Any other cool ideas? I also have a 17" monitor I can hook up as a second display for previewing or other stuff. Any ideas for that?

Thanks for the input!
~Garrett