Premiere on Good PC
 

I have a pentium D 945 dual processor 3.4mhz, with 1gb of ddr2....

I have premiere on it, and when ever I try to preview in the monitor in premiere after i have edited footage, it is really choppy and even when it is in draft quality it is still choppy.... My friend has a dell computer, penntium 4 i think with 2.6mhz and only 512 of memory and his will preview fine....

Does ANYBODY know why this happens?

something to do with video card?
something to do with needing more memory?
is it my hard drive? (by the way my friend uses a SATA drive)

Only one hard drive???

Add a secondary dedicated drive for data and projects.

OS and applications on the boot drive.
Data and projects on the secondary drive.

Also defragment your drives often so there is lots of continous blocks of free space (hard drives that have to jump around all over the place to get the next chunk of data are SLLLLOOOOWWWWWW.....)

You don't mention it in your post but is your HD a 5400 RPM drive?

You should have at least one 7200 RPM drive just for Premiere projects.

Regards
JohnG

Do you have any programs running in the back? Anti virus etc?

I had a problem like this a couple of years a go, and it was down to the HD, although I had an old seagate 7200rpm ide drive it was jumping all over the place when I played video in Premiere. I could over come this by forcing premiere to render every bit of video (but that took ages to do). When I got around to replacing it with a better model, problems went away.

just a few suggestions...

You don't necessarily have to use a 7200 RPM drive to get smooth operation but it sure does help! If you have an option take the faster drive.

I don't know what version of Premiere you have but if it's at least 6.5, try accessing project settings, then click on playback settings, then ONLY check Playback on Desktop. Make sure the other two are unchecked. Then resave that project with those new settings.