Hardware for Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements 9

Question

I'm buying a PC for my 9th grade child, who will be making short movies (5-10 minutes) and burning to DVD for school projects.  I will be purchasing the Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements 9 bundle.  The PC will also be used for writing papers, reports, etc., but I suspect that the PSE9/PE9 will be the software that drives the PC to its knees.  We'd be using a DV camcorder with a 1394 cable for video capture, or a HD camcorder with SD cards.
The household is a PC/Windows sort of household.  I can get a discount buying HP stuff, and the budget is somewhat limited.  I'd appreciate comments on my thoughts/options below, especially for the video cards (I assume that those will affect performance the most?)
All the HP configurations within my budget include:
1600x900 monitor (I'm thinking of upgrading to 1920x1020)
DVD multiburner (I'm not upgrading to Blu-Ray)
Windows 7 Home
Intel i5-650 dual core (possible upgrade to i7-750 quad core)
6GB RAM
Video card choices: 1GB nvidia Geforce 315, or 1GB ATI Radeon HD5450 (lower end slimline HP box)
2GB nvidia Geforce GT420, or 2GB ATI Radeon HD5570 (higher end HP minitower)
1 hard disk only (3GB/s 750 GB or 1 TB drive)
I was testing the trial version of Premiere Elements 9 on my laptop at home, which runs Vista-32, 3GB RAM, and has nvidia 9600m GT graphics.  I found that the performance was acceptable (although I didn't exercise the software very hard), until burning to DVD, at which point I went to have dinner while the laptop was burning the project (and didn't finish burning until after dinner & dessert!).
I appreciate the advice!
Thanks!

Answer 1

Back on the hardware page where you started this, "look up" to Hardware Guidance -- Look here first, it's the best way to start 
Click and read all of the articles
You really MUST have a minimum of TWO hard drives for video editing
Read Harm on drive setup http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972?tstart=0
- click the embedded picture in Harm's message to enlarge to reading size
- you need AT LEAST 2 drives for video editing, 3 is better
- some HD formats work better with (require) RAID
NEVER, EVER use Partitions!!!
Read Hunt on Partitions http://forums.adobe.com/thread/650708?tstart=0
A link with many ideas about computer setup http://forums.adobe.com/thread/436215?tstart=0
Since Elements is 32bit there is no advantage to having more than 6 Gig of ram
Since Elements does NOT do hardware video acceleration using the video card, the less expensive ATI card is OK
Since Elements does NOT use dual video cards for anything, you only need one ATI card
For HD video you absolutely need the i7-750 quad core
More on Trying to use only ONE Hard Drive for Video Editing
You are a music conductor, with a baton that you use to point to various parts of the orchestra... this is like Windows pointing to various parts of the hard drive to do Windows housekeeping or to load program segments for various functions
Now, at the same time and with the same hand... while still using the baton to conduct the orchestra... pick up a bow and play a fiddle... this would be doing something with your video file at the same time as all the other work
You as a person cannot do both at the same time with the same hand
A computer is a LITTLE better, in that it can switch from one kind of task to another very quickly... but not quickly enough for easy video editing
One hard drive is not as good as two which is not as good as three