Vegas 6 RAM Question
 

I recently upgraded my old emachines t2858 with 2GB of RAM (XP system 2) up from 512....yet the render times have not changed. Should I have bought a new video card instead?

Upgrading your CPU is really the only way to decrease render times.
2GB of RAM will mean less hard drive paging and, with the exception of the full version of Magic Bullet, a different video card will not have any effect.

Unless you're wading neck-deep into HDV and lots of effects I doubt you'd need even 2GB of ram.

If you want to see what's REALLY happening inside your PC I suggest you download a neat little freeware utility called RamPage. It sits in your System Tray and displays just how much of your ram is sitting idle. RamPage's original purpose was to "free up" ram but I think Windows now does an excellent job of that all by itself, so I suggest setting the "free up memory when ram falls to:" box to 0. This way RamPage just serves to display idle memory.

I have found that in most cases Vegas never uses more than several dozens of MB of ram. The ONLY reason I recently upped my ram from 1 to 2GB was because I was making heavy use of multiple instances of DeShaker, and had found that Pass2 of that program could suck up 300MB of ram all by itself when working with HDV files.


Right now my XPpro system is occupying ~700MB of ram (RamPage shows "1320"). If I load a 45-minute DV project (nothing fancy) then RamPage drops to 1228. Open instead a 1-hour HDV project and RamPage shows "1134." Still a LONG ways from "0" and where we would begin to get slowdowns from disk paging.

Not true. I was rendering out an HDV project on Vegas 7 with 2gb of ram, and at the last second, I got an error message saying not enough ram or something, so the last second of my project didn't get rendered at all. I might consider upping to 4gb of ram because of this.

This was with a brand new Core 2 Duo computer built from scratch a month ago too.

Richard is correct. Unless you have large numbers of stills, and they're large stills/graphics, more RAM doesn't benefit rendertimes for Vegas.
Your project likely failed due to something else at the end of your timeline, resource calls, large file, heat, or other cause. RAM was likely not it.
Reduce your RAM, reduce your render threads, the project will likely finish just fine.