FCP 7 slow with many stills.  rMBP with 16 GB RAM?

I'm editing documentaries that are heavy heavy with stills, and they must be high res.  I'm frustrated with my 3 year oldl MBP's sluggishness and looking at getting something new. I am considering the 16 GB rMBP in order to have the high RAM, but will this solve the problem I'm having?  I also need to have other things open when I work -- i.e. to search Google for info, to read MAIL, to work on paper cut on WORD.  My MBP just can't seem to handle it all.  PLUS i am storing everything on hard external drives, so they are also churning (most are firewire 800).
I've read lots of debates about the new MBP and the only real reason I'm considering the retina is the option to get 16 GB RAM, but is there an alternative option to have fast/more capable of handling it all? 
I'm not a professional editor/ I'm a producer of oral history based documentaries and it's just simpler to do the edit myself usually, so I'm not very sophisticated about some of the technical aspects of things. 
I do very simple things in FCP 7 -- cuts, fades, cross fades.  combining interviews with film clips with photos and music.  nothing else flashy.  Maybe I don't even need to be using FCP???
thanks for the time to listen to my challenges!

More RAM is not going to help you with FCP 7. (FCP X, however, would gladly use as much RAM as you can stuff into the beefiest of workstations.)
I don't own the new MBP, but the people who do (including family members) tell me it is crazy fast. TB is obviously going to be a huge step up in speeds – although selection of drives is limited.
I suspect your current speed issues are related to your stills. Final Cut will gag on a lot of  high res images – and those > 4K will sometimes crash it. So if you want a more pleasant editing experience, resize your images to something approximating your sequence size. I routinely size mine in PS to a 1920 preset…except those that I'm going to put pans and zooms on. In the latter case, I might bump it by a factor of 1.5 or 2.0, depending on the move. What I don't do (anymore) is lay a bunch of 18 mpx images on a TL, when I know FCP is just going to discard most of those pixels anyway.
Good luck.
Russ

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