Honestly, I know this sounds harsh, but cutting for home on a PC is a nightmare, and setting you up for disaster.
I am, after a long, long war of being a PC nut, a veritable templar at the alter of Windows... I am now a Mac convert.
Sell your PC, get a mac, and scam some FCP or buy FCP Express to learn.
If you're thinking that you should run editing on a PC, you're wrong. You can argue with me, PC people, but I know I'm right on this. I've built gaming rigs, and all sorts of other systems in PC land from the ground up for the last decade. I was a builder freak.
My life in PC world: working the new drivers, then the newer drivers that are supposed to support this... but really they don't, reinstalling the last version drivers having trouble interfacing with the new DDR RAM, having to buy a new mobo for a feature that you need to try to speed up your video processing only to find it isn't supported, getting a rootkit hack, tracking down the sudden slowdown caused by the jumper prog in your system tray....
...and the list goes on and on.
I was doing more maintenance and workarounds, than actual work.
I said screw it. So I saved $350 on a machine compared to apple, so what. MY TIME IS MONEY, TOO.
I jumped ship for not having to want to mess with the damn drivers anymore. Not messing with it all that crap, knowing that popping in the disk will make the program function completely, and basically crash free, and getting back to the editing made me happy.
So here's why I say sell the FLIPPIN' PC and move on:
First off, Vista is too thick and ram clogging for you to do anything with it, and almost anyone that cuts video is on XP.
You can't sweat that kind of RAM, and more importantly, you just don't need the clock cycles jammed by that many apps clogging the pipe to check up on other parts of the system.
Secondly, I consider the interface and the problems with home cutting to be with the de-integration of parts in the system. Vista, and XP for that matter, are going to always have issues with conversion, drivers, and software-to-hardware conflicts all the time. This isn't an exaggeration. In my PC building obsession days, I had to go PC, until Macs and other computers got fast enough to handle HDV.
That was where price/computing power/willing to spend hit a bullseye.
PC world is still mired in it.
Thirdly, Final Cut is generation two software.
Want to adjust an eyeline in the viewer or timeline? Press W and pull it around in wireframe.
Close a gap? Touch the gap, and it will ask you.
Avid needs to cut the cord, and start over, and do a radical redisign, but it can't, considering all of the oldies that use it.
Yeah, Avid has a ton of plug-ins, which are awesome, but there is no 'Compressor' program, which is a breeze, and the best thing ever. Also, 'Color' is a pimp.
Everything is incorporated.
All I can say is this... do you want to really edit, or are you messing around? If you're messing around, save the money, stay in PC land and get a copy of Pinnacle whatever.
If you're going to really try for something in a project, sell that turd of a PC machine, and go for FCP.
An editing system should be turnkey. Not something to be constantly jacking with on mission critical work. If you blow up an editing problem, you should know definitively that it was your fault, and in PC land, a lot of times, the machine just blows up.
It's a windows thing.
Don't play in windows land with editing.
Go Unix. Go Mac.