Hi.... I am going to be editing my movie soon...

I was wondering if there was a way you could tell which machine is better to use. I have two PCs, both of which are very similar, a Sony Vaio Desktop and a Hewlett Packard Media Center Edition... They are both very good. I have an external hard drive also. I was wondering what are the most important elements of the machine. Any help is much needed and appreciated. Thank you.

depending on the software, if you use premiere, HP would be better choice, a lot of people seems to have problem with the Son Vaio Desktop with Premiere

But both obviously would require good memory, nothing running on background, etc.

well I'm pretty sure I'm using Vegas

the most important elements of the machine Pure processing power. Find the machine that crunches the numbers the fastest.

Lot's of RAM is nice too :)

like 2.4 vs 2.7 ghz?

what do you mean punches the numbers...

I know what RAM is at least :)

Thanks everyone

ps- does anyone know an easy way to get rid of programs running the background?

2.7 GHz is faster, raw chip set wise but it may not be performing up to snuff. There are benchmark utilities you can download and run on a computer that will tell you how fast things are crunching. I'd run those tests AFTER I turn off all the crap running in the background.

http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,110667,00.asp

http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

thanks friend