Laptop Upgrade For Encoding Vid. Help!

I will be upgrading my laptop soon to enable faster encoding of video. The types of things I do most often are:

Encoding mpg to xvid (for playback on dvp642 and to save space on dvds)
Re-encoding vids to remove qpel and gmc and to embed subtitles.
Exporting vbr to wav.
Re-encoding avi and other formats to mpeg-2.
Ripping dvds and encoding vob to avi and ac3 to mp3.

The tools I use most often:
vdub, tmpeg, vdub mod, all codecs, nandub, dvdshrink, dvdx, nero, dvd decrypter.

I use currently an s250 toshiba satellite with 60gb HD (unfortunately only 4200 rpm), 512kb ram (256 per slot), P4-M 2.8 GHZ, RW dvd drive, and an acom data 80gb external HD at 7200 rpm connected via usb 2.0.

I would like to know what upgrades will improve my encoding performance. I am think about upgrading to 2 pc2700 1gb sticks of ram (so freaking expensive though). Will this make a difference?

Also, would it be faster to encode from and to my external HD since it's faster than my internal, even though I have to pass through a usb 2.0 connection first, and would reformatting the external drive from fat32 to ntfs improve my performance?

Would switching to a firewire external HD be any better than usb 2.0?

And, are there any OS modifications I can try too that may speed things up? I am currently using xp.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this.

rip suprnova

 

Umm

for this one its a bit tricky. Is this ur only PC? if yes
you could give it a try (its a good try), encoding and decoding should be fine...

You say you want to ripp dvds - is your drive internal or external?

The ram you have is fine (but if you want save up little by little and get it - - in about 3-5 months the price will drop)

Usb is faster ( approx.280 mb per sec)
Firewire is more accurate (but slower) (approx .220-240) mb per second

Keep up on the post

 

yes, this is my only comp.

as far as my dvd burner goes, it is internal and slow, but i don't mind that much.

the main things i would like to improve are encoding and decoding after everything is already on my HD. i have no trouble doing them now, they just take a while.

so are you saying that increasing my ram will not make much difference?

 

when it comes to playing with media,,, its all about how much money you want to spend...

Like if i were you "personally" i would give it a try