[Julie Davies] “I’m running on a laptop but with 2 hard drives. I’m only using the C drive at present.”
If you have a second internal hard drive(maybe 7200rpm) try moving your source footage to there, you never mentioned what kind of footage you are trying to edit, if DV there should be no problems, also HDV, unless multiple streams(over 2), AVCHD(h264/mp4) is a cpu choker, with a laptop with 2 drives I found the best combination is to use the c drive for the OS and Apps the second drive for media cache, preview files, still images, audio clips, etc, and an external esata drive for source footage(capture footage/audio)