[Number_two]

after a few days fiddling with the settings i found why it happens… if you give more than 300-400 mb ram for ram previews, mpg rendering goes crazy, it varies cpu usage from 10 – 50%, averaging usualy at around 35% , having render times around 30-50% realtime on my pc (again, 2.66 c2d, 4gb ram).
setting the ram preview memory below 350 mb returns the rendering cpu usage to 92-100%, giving render times around 1.6x realtime.

[Number_two]

i ve been using vista on my home pc for testing.Although vegas works great I wouldnt recomend it for serious projects mainly because of poorly written audio and video drivers.Ati 7.2 drivers are almost ok but slower than xp in opengl, nvidia still very buggy,creative ‘s drivers are barely basic (should be considered as beta).Vista needs a lot of memory, but if you have a pc with xp, with instant search,defender,and gadgets installed, it would consume more memory than a similar vista installation.
I ve had no problems for my tests and home renders,and the general feel of vista is better, the new explorer is more practical than the xp one and render times are about 0-5 % slower than xp.
After effects works fine with the latest ati 7.2 drivers,but opengl is still flaky with vista.The opengl previews wouldnt work with the first vista drivers, but anyway i had no crashes.
Bottom line, vista isnt evil nor awful, display drivers are! in a few months it should be alright, but if you re not in the mood of experimenting and messing around with your pc configuration/ or have important projects running that cant be delayed, stay with xp

[Number_two]

i ve been using both for quite a few years now.I use premiere for straight forward – simple projects and prefer vegas for more music videoclip kind of things.
I love the interface.its amazing how fast you can do things in vegas.Moving around,zooming,crossfading and effects are really easy to use.I sometimes use vegas instead of after effects becase it feels more “realtime”, i just press play on a loop and mess around with settings,effects and motion, something that cant be done on any adobe program.
On the other hand, i personally dislike (or rather hate) avid s interface.I cant do anything on it.I dont like FCP either, feels something between avid and premiere to me.
The integration part of adobe sounds intriging, but i m not sure how useful or usable – or frequently used can be.Working with clips that are not rendered can be superslow.
And yes, vegas render is slow but the previews are fast.
The dvd quality render of vegas though is the best i ve encountered.Dvd Architect is kinda simple, but that means fast interface too.
Most important:Try some demos first before deciding anything!