Tell your IT guys a Premiere Pro edit system needs to be an all new system, in addition to the one currently in use.  It's bad practice to use your edit system for anything but editing.  A lot of office and other productivity software can wreak havoc on an edit rig.

You really need two computers.

From the capabilities you mentioned, I can only derive that it is a system at least 4 years old, maybe much more and it lacks anything a decent PC would have today. Upgrading components is money down the drain, because the basic ingredients for comfortable editing are missing (good CPU, fast FSB, on-board sound, firewire, PCI-e slots, dual or triple channel memory, etc. ). Your 80 GB disk is telling in that respect.

Even non-profit organisations need to recognize that PC's are outdated quickly and using state-of-the-art programs like PR require state-of-the-art PC's.

For editing a USB disk is worthless. It can be used for backups, but not for editing. Maybe have a look here: How to get the best from a PC? Some guides...

An editing machine, properly set up, can also function for other things.

I often have several Adobe applications running, PrPro, PS, AI and Encore, and also have my word processor going, when I'm doing Title work. Obviously, with multiple applications launched it will take more horsepower, but it's easily doable. Even my laptop is up to the task, but it IS a beefy laptop.

The concept of keeping an editing rig clean, lean and mean, is a very good one. However, in real world situations we often have to compromise a bit.

One thing that I do not have is any Internet presence, while editing, as I shut down all AV, pop-up blockers and spyware sweepers to edit. Even behind a hardware firewall, I will do nothing like Web browsing, or e-mail. Just makes sense. Now, I have those capabilities on my machine (e-mail only on that laptop), but to free all possible resources, I refrain from using them when editing.

For a minimum editing rig, I go along with Harm, that a 3x HDD system is the starting point. The first (your C:\) can be smaller, but needs as much speed as you can get. Use it for only your OS and programs. In the case of a 3x HDD system, you'll probably leave your Windows Virtual Memory (Page File) on the C:\, as well. There are speed advantages to having it elsewhere, but with only 2 more HDD's to play with, C:\ will work. Your other two physical (not partitions) HDD's can be D:\ media and E:\ Projects and Scratch Disks. Speed is good for these, but size is probably the main criterion. SATA II would be my choice of controllers.

CPU power and RAM are important, but too many go for killer CPU's and tons of RAM and totally forget the I/O sub-system, i.e. the HDD's. Do not sacrifice the HDD's for a bump in CPU or RAM. Without the HDD's, those will be nearly useless in the overall scheme of things.

Your video and your audio cards need not be all that robust. A bit more GPU power can be nice for some Effects and Transitions, but with PrPro you don't really need that much.

Good luck,

Hunt

PS Harm's articles are great resources. He starts with basic systems and works up to full-blown editing-only rigs. You do not see that too often.

ZooHeather,

Even if using externals, having multiple physical HDD's (not partitions of one physical HDD) will improve your experience greatly.

I do a lot of editing to/from externals, as I need the portability to do work on my laptop, as well as my workstation. Even the laptop has 3x 200GB 7200RPM SATA II's. I use FW-800 connections for my externals, but eSATA would be even better.

If you do not need the portability of Projects, I would do this:

3x internal HDD's per my (and Harm's) earlier suggestion, and allocate them pretty much the same. Use your external as a media storage unit. I have a NAS drive for much of that. Copy just the Assets that you will need to your D:\ for that/those Project(s). The originals will be on your external(s) for "safe keeping." Unless your external(s) was either FW-800, or eSATA, I would not try to draw the Assets from it to edit. I found that from my gigabit NAS, my USB 2.0 and my FW-400's, this was a painful process and frought with potential problems. I would very strongly suggest against using an NAS, a USB or a FW-400 external for anything except archival storage.

Good luck,

Hunt

PS what happens with a single physical HDD is that you are asking it to try and do about four tasks at the same time. Regardless of its speed, there will be bottle necks. Something will just have to get in line and wait until all other Processes finish. This is very slow and puts a major strain on that one HDD. Fry's (Western US retailer) just had 1TB Seagate (IIRC) 7200RPM internal ATA-300's for US$89.00 with full installation kit. HDD's are very cheap now. I still recall paying about US$400 for my first 10MB MFM HDD to expand up from the OEM 5MB unit. Decades ago, but still very expensive. Not any more. Do yourself a favor and go for the 3x as a minimum. Tell IT that it is the only way to go. I'm a donor to the Phoenix Zoo, and if I knew that they needed a couple of HDD's for editing, guess where my donations would be ear-marked.