After Effects very slow - would love some help

Question

Ok,
Here is my system :
Vista 64 Ult.
Q6600
P5Q-E
8 gig of RAM
Geforce GSO 9600
I am working with a project that is 1500 X 1050 (approx) - it contains some camera moves and some page peel effects on pictures - and it is running unbearably slow...
I have enabled Disk caching to a separate SATA drive - also I notice that when I am running CS3 - is saying it only recognizes 4 gigs of RAM.
I have also enable Multiprocess for frames.  Now, I am not even close to a regular user of After Effects, so this might come as obvious, but what can I do here?  Is there a set of steps to help me speed this up?  I did take a look at
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WSF13D6BED-C53B-408a-B2D6-C8B4205D4FB7a.html
for improving performance and I did try to touch on most of the points I could understand like making my virtual drive space to 2X the amount of RAM.
Now, I am trying to precompose most of my elements, but I don't know if that is overkill.  Really, I just want to ensure that with my new system, it was worth the money and upgrade.

Answer 1

Thanks for all the effort and time.  I think I might be getting somewhere with your help.
"You are right. Plus if your render crashes you won't have to re-render the already rendered frames. PNG is lossless quality where JPEG is lossy quality. Depending on the compression setting, the computation from the calculated jpg frame can be lower than the computation time for PNG. You can try on a 30 sec portion to see what is faster."
I haven't tried JPG yet but I will.  I want to have something that I can output to DVD with decent quality. Right now .mov looks good, but will try the JPGS.
Another thing to take into account is the writing speed of the file on your HDD. If you are rendering on the same disk where the sources are, or on  a USB external drive, it will take more time than rendering on an internal sata/e-stata drive or a raid array. In image sequence, this is more important as AE have to write/close a file for each frame, and depending on your configuration (windows,mac, antivirus, timemachine...) it can make a huge difference.
I have a separate SATA drive for disk caching.  I did that right away.  I was wondering about the memory caching though in the preferences panel - I am not sure if I should just leave the defaults for that :
MAX MEMORY USAGE
MAX DISK CACHE SIZE
"If on PC try to disconnect it from the web and turn of your antivirus."
My rendering computer is not connected to the internet, so I don't have an anti-virus running on it.  It only get programs from my internet computer that have been thoroughly checked first.
You will save time. Turn off disk indexing too.
How do I do this on a PC?
Could you please explain what you mean by "negate its impact fully by using the corresponding layer style instead of the effect. They it's slightly faster"?
Instead of using the drop shadow effect, right clic on your layer in the time line menu and select "Layer style > Drop shadow". It will have the same behavior/options than the Photoshop counterpart. It's better and faster than the drop shadow effect.
I will try this.  Thanks
A good way to know what step takes more time than the other (and a good way to figure out what part of the process you have to optimise) is twirling down, in the render queue the "current render" line. It will tell you for every frame, what the rendering is actually doing. The longer the step, the longer it's name will stay on screen.
That is a great tip.
Can you tell me if the comp size makes a difference when I am rendering out 720X540?  The main challenge for me is that I have about another 10 minutes to add to the project.  I don't want this to take me 2 hours to render out 15 minutes!
Well it probably will. 2 hours of rendering for 15minutes is not that bad. You're doing motion graphics, not editing. Also, if your pictures are jpeg, it add computational time, because the render have to decompress it in memory in order to work with it. If you have disk space, you'd rather like to convert all your jpeg to uncompressed tiff files, so the render engine will just have to load it in memory in order to press it.
That is another great idea.  I didn't know that TIFF were better.
I am going to OC my Q6600 slight, to see if there is any effect.  Another issue I am running into is that AE says my Graphics card is not an OPENGL card.  But the package says it is!
Have you downloaded the latest drivers for your card yet ? If not try to do so, restart your PC and check again into AE."
Yes, I have the newest drivers (it is a new card and I had to go to the NVIDIA site just to get them.  The problem is that I have posted on the NVIDIA board days ago about this issue and no one has given me an answer yet concerning this.  I just checked again with AE - it says. "NO COMPATIBLE OPENGL CARD FOUND"
It is an Nvidia 9600 GSO 768Mg video card.