Should I keep my windows media edition , or upgrade to vista ultimate?

[mad cowboy]

MY particular needs are in movie editing. Semi pro you might call me. I have a dell dimension E510 and I have the chance to upgrade to vista ultimate which I want basically for the Movie maker 6? Will vista change me much? Will MM6 be the answer to my problems? (MM2 giving me problems wont give up the dvd . closing unexpectedly. that kinda stuff) Is there a good free or cheap Movie maker editors ? and has anybody worked with MM6 ?

[oracle128]

I've worked with WMM2, but not 6, but I can tell you, MM6 is no replacement for a proper video editing suit. WMM may be ok for the casual home user, but you say you're specific needs are for video editing, in which case I assume WMM isn't going to be nearly good enough.

In case you're curious, here's an overview of WMM6's features as compared to WMM2

AVIDemux is a free video editor, but really doesn't offer much more than WMM.
VirtualDub and Jahshaka are two great free alternatives to pro video editing software; but honestly, if you're serious about your editing (and by using the term "semi pro" I gather you might be), there simply is no replacement for the proper commercial originals such as Adobe Premiere or Ulead Media Studio. If you're serious, you need to spend the cash; that's usually how it works.

If you're willing to learn a Linux environment, you have a few more choices; Cinelerra, LiVES and Kino. The latter 2 aren''t much better than WMM or AVIDemux, but the former is a lot more powerful than than any of the other free alternatives. Not quite a match for the commercial products, but impressively powerful nonetheless.

[Miz]

A requirement for both heavy video edition and Vista is a lot of RAM. Based on what I can find out about the Dimension e510, it sells with 512 mb of RAM. That's not nearly enough for Vista alone...one gig minimum for Vista to run okay, two gigs for best performance. Add video editing on top of Vista's requirements and the system will not perform satisfactorily with less than two gigs.