hi tech support. first time poster, long time lurker...

so i'm looking to replace windows movie maker, which for some reason decided to not work anymore on my laptop. it won't let me open any files larger than 500mb and freezes all the time when i use smaller files.

so i'm not looking for anything fancy, as long as it lets me do the non-linear editing thing, adding/editing mp3 audio and support as many file types as possible, but mainly avi and mkv.

i guess user-friendliness is the thing i'm after the most.

thanks.

steal adobe premier from the internet

what OS are you using and whats the amount of RAM youre using?

vista. 1gb ram.

is adobe premier easy to use/learn? my only video editing experience is windows movie maker.

hmmm im not sure off the top of my head, but doesnt vista require more ram to run at the low end of productive? can you add more memory? if unsure, http://www.crucial.com will run a scan on your PC and let you know not only how much it can support but offer a decent price on that too

i'm sorry, i'm not computer savvy at all. what's the additional memory for? you think that's why wmm stopped working?

i've done some googling and there seems to be a lot of bugs on that software, a lot of people complaining of the same thing, so i'm not sure additional memory is the solution.

also, i used to rely on wmm, it worked fine, until one day recently it just started acting funny (freezing, not letting me load large files, etc).

i guess i'll check out the adobe one.

damn you for making me actually think and recall important data instead of useless facts.

your computer has two types of memory, there is hard drive and RAM.

Hard Drive
the hard drive is where you save files. anything you install or save to your computer goes somewhere on your hard drive. most HDs now are at least 500gig, which back in the day, would have been overkill, but now, its easy to amass that much data

RAM

this is the memory your computer uses to run. any program you run, from your operating system to your media player is run through here. think of your ram as a inbetween station. when you open a program, it is moved into RAM to be run. when you open another program, the previous program goes to the background and the new one takes its place. if there are too many programs open, your computer will slow down, as it now moves the programs from RAM to your virtual disk (this is part of your HD that the computer quarantines and uses to replicate the settings of RAM).

the more ram you have, the more programs you can have open at one time. as an example, i used to use corel draw. my PC had 512 mb of RAM at the time. it took approx 2 minutes to open. when i upgraded my ram to 2.5 gig, it ended up taking like 15-20 seconds.

i see.

maybe i could use some additional ram memory.

thanks peeps.

I'm going to second that suggestion. You can't do shit with 1gb.