Optimizing Adobe Premiere

My wife us using Adobe Premiere 7 (1.xx), and I’m looking for ways to improve her computer’s performance.

Her current rig:

  • Athlon 64, single core, 3200+ (2Ghz)

  • 2GB RAM (DDR 400)

  • 80GB Seagate 7,200 RPM (8MB cache): two partitions, C for Windows and D for files

  • 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE (16MB cache): three partitions, two for backup files, one for video files

I have purchased an Athlon 4200 X2 (dual core, 512kb x2 cache), which hasn’t arrived yet. It’s not as fast as I would like (I’m trying to find a good 1MB cache chip), but it will hopefully improve matters in the short term at least.

I’m interested in knowing what else I can do to improve performance. I have separated the scratch disk from the working file disk and the page file disk, and made a few other basic tweaks, I’m mainly interested in knowing what I can do in terms of hardware. Would RAID help? I also have a 160GB Raptor I could throw in (which I would like to use as the system drive).