Running very low on system memory message

Question

At the suggestion of "the wine snob" I am starting this as a separate thread.
I just started tuning into this forum because on Sunday, I decided that I would try to do something with the vdeo clips that my husband took on a recent trip with a Flip ultra HD and to utilize the opportunity to start to get familiar with Premiere elements 7.  The clips had already been imported into the computer, so I brought them in to PREL  as files, rather than as video capture.
All day long, the program kept crashing, often preceded by the message in the title of this post (see attachment).  By about 6 PM not only did the program crash, but the entire computer crashed to blue screen, ugh!!
This is on a relatively new system, purchased in April, a dell XPS 435T, quad core with 6 gb of ram and an ATI Radeon4870 GDDR5 video card with 1024 mb of video ram running Vista Home Premium 64 bit.
I was ready to pull my hair out.  It made no sense to me that I should have such trouble with program and system crashes when a few months back, I was bringing in a lot of old hi 8  video into PREL, on a 4 year old laptop, with a single processor and 2 gb of ram.  I made a few short video and never had these issues.
Then it dawned on me that those files all came in as avi files; the Flip video comes in as mp4s.  So I googled something like "mp4 premiere elements," and it brought me to this post by Steve Grisetti:
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/437535?tstart=0
So I downloaded the suggested software and converted all of these Flip clips to avi.  When I started the new project in PREL, I wasn't sure if I used the correct preset so out of curiosity, I started a new project choosing the HDV 720 p 30 preset and one last time tried using the mp4 clips.  PREL crashed again after about 5 minutes if it took that long, preceeded first by the low system memory message.
So then I tried a project using the avi files and guess what.  I'm going over an hour here and still have not crashed.
I think it would be helpful if those of you who have had this message could post what kind of clips you have been working on (the file format) as well as the computer specs and operating system.  Maybe if any of the Adobe tech support staff peek into this forum, they will see a trend in these posts.
Regards,
Cynthia Merzer

Answer 1

At least you are getting this error message, as it gives one a moment to Save recent edits. At this point, I would do a Save_As and increment by say 01 so if the program does shut down, while doing the Save, you do not run the risk of corrupting your Project. If the Save_As does go well, there is nothing lost, other than the time to reboot and relaunch.
Now, I would definitely look at the "Clean, Lean & Mean Editing Machine" article. Much imporvement can be made to an editing computer, even one just out of the box. Steve G. also has several FAQ articles on optimizing one's system for NLE work and for Vista. All will be useful.
Upon delivery, most purchased computers are at about 20% to 60% of potential. There is usually a ton of bloatware that does nothing for the users, except sap resources. As we add programs, more of this "stuff" is added. As we update and the like, temp files and various elements of detritus will fill the HDD's. I know that it sounds odd that a brand new computer would be filled with "stuff" so early on, but it is a fact of life. At least most mfgr's do not still install AOL "stuff" that is of little use and just takes up room and tons of resources. Still, there are too many similar programs, that cost performance.
Good luck,
Hunt