I've been doing some video editing (and audio editing) for business presentations. As CEO of a small, fast-growing business, I do not have the luxury of walking away from the computer for half an hour while Adobe Premier Elements converts a video I've created into Flash or DVD format (which is what Adobe TS said I should do – walk away and don’t use the machine while it’s converting). I need to continue working.

I also need to minimize the chance of overloading the system and having a crash!

I'm running XP on an HP Compaq business desktop machine with the following specs according to what I got from HP:

Intel® Q35 chipset integrated
Intel® Core 2 Duo E6850 processor

I'm trying to determine whether I'm better off having 3GB or 4GB or RAM in it. The questions revolve around XP using only 3GB or a tad more, and the fact that, so I'm told, once I put 4 1GB memory sticks into this board, which uses up all four slots, it automatically goes into Dual Channel mode.

I'm told it won't go into Dual Channel mode until all 4 1-GB sticks are in, and that once they are it automatically kicks into Dual Channel mode by itself. This is after a few talks with HP TS (possibly even level 3 TS).

I would think the maximum amount of memory, and Dual Channel operation, is a good thing.

However, Since I keep hearing that XP is only able to use 3GB or a tad more, I'm wondering if, in fact, it will work better with 3GB than with 4GB. I'm wondering if Dual Channel mode is a good thing for XP or maybe not so good.

If XP is in Dual Channel Mode and it's faced with the choice of using 2GB (channel one) or 4GB (both channels one and two), I'm wondering if that may result in it choosing to use only 2GB (one channel) since it can’t use 4GB.

Whereas having only 3 1-GB sticks in it seems to ensure it will fully utilize the 3GB (since it won't be faced with choosing between 2GB or 4GB).

The type of RAM it's using is:

DIMM 240-pin - DDR II - 800 MHz / PC2-6400

Optimized performance would be nice, too, of course, but avoiding a crash is the supreme priority. (I lost a month last year to a Pentium 4 crash while getting up to speed with using this video editing software -- maybe just a coincidence, maybe pushed the machine beyond its abilities.)

For what it's worth, the HP techs suggested that while XP won't use all of the 4GB, my more resource-intensive "apps" very likely will. They suggested I ask Adobe what their software will use. I have no idea if those HP techs knew what they're talking about, and that still doesn't quite answer the question of how XP itself will be using the available RAM -- nor does it tell me which I should care about more: how XP utilizes the RAM or how the more resource-intensive apps utilize it.