60 Second RAM Preview Delay - "Not Responding" message
 

So when ever I try to RAM Preview something in AE, the program freezes for about 60 seconds before it even starts rendering. During this time the program freezes and displays a "Not Responding" message along the top of the program. After about 60 seconds it unfreezes and starts rendering normally. This makes it pretty time consuming to wait a minute for every little preview.

I also noticed the program frequently has these "temporary freezes" and displays "Not Responding" pretty much whenever it does anything. Such as opening new projects, importing, etc. Whats up with that? I'm on Vista, which has always been quick to throw out the Not Responding tags, but come on. Is it time for a new upgraded machine?

I checked my Processes and currently AE is sitting at 850mb memory used, gets up 1.1gb used when rendering. CPU usage is 10% and physical memory is 60%.

What can I do to improve performance? This is year 2 on this setup, last year I never experienced these issues.