I have a Sony TRV240 Digital 8 camcorder onto which I transfer digital video that I have eidted on my PC using Pinnacle Studio 7 software. Every so often (and that might be once or twice in a transfer 5 minutes long) the computer appears to hesitate for a moment meaning that I lose a few frames of recorded video. When played back on the camcorder this looks and sounds like a hiccup in the tape - momentary loss of sound etc. My computer has a 1300 processor, twin 40 gigabyte hard discs - admittedly there is a lot of other stuff on these discs, but I first started using "enditall" to close all unwanted programmes before video editing, and now I use msconfig.exe to boot up with the startup group disabled so that nothing else runs. Any ideas what else I can do. Is there any more information about my set up I should provide here to enable someone to advise a solution?

Probably:

1. The hard disk is seeking during the recording to the camera.
2. The swap file is being written to during the recording to the camera.
3. Some other program is doing something during this period.

Try:
1. Defragmenting the hard disk - removed unncessary seeks.
2. Turn off the swap file, ie disable virtual memory. If you have less than 256MB of ram this may break your machine!
3. Close down all other program, especially virus checkers.
4. Check the hard disks are using UDMA in the BIOS settings and not PIO mode. It should also tell you this when the machine boots up.
5. Put the windows swap file on the drive you are NOT storing the video on. By default Windows will use the C drive, so try putting the video on the D drive.

Upgrades you could try:
1. If you have 128mb or less, add another 128MB.
2. Add a 7200rpm UDMA hard disk and use that instead of the existing ones.
3. Buy a cheap EIDE raid controller (£20-£50) and add two stripped (RAID 0) ATA-133 7200rpm UDMA hard disks.

Kind Regards,
Shane Cook.