Stompin' comp gets swamped! Full story, p. 5

So, most of you out there know that I've been working on a cartoon. Lately, our Dell computer has been lagging with the Macromedia Flash program. It sometimes took me up to 30 seconds to add a single frame to the piece--and at twelve frames per animation second, that adds up to a lot of sitting and waiting and getting frustrated. On top of that, the working file for the toon is fast approaching 70MB, and it was taking at least 10 minutes to save the file to my hard drive. I tried closing out every process that wasn't absolutely necessary for the computer to run. I tried boosting Flash's system priority to "High". But still, Flash sucked up around 200 of the computer's 256 MB of RAM.

After about a week of getting barely any work done, I decided that it was time that I got a computer that had more RAM. Because, you see, I assumed that my computer just didn't have enough, and that's why Flash took so long. So I go to the Dell website, and I customize myself one super slick speed box. 3.2 Gigahertz processor speed (more than twice what our older computer boasts), 2 Gigabytes of RAM (eight times as much), 80 GB on the hard drive, a 19-inch flat screen monitor, two DVD drives, and a subwoofer to boot. So I figure, this will have to be the end-all for speed (within my price range), right? So I get the thing, install Flash, do a little editing work on my file, try to save it. Nine minutes. Okay, I admit, a slight improvement, but not near what I had hoped for. So I did some more investigating. Apparently Flash tends to use around 200 MB of RAM a lot of the time that it's running. But I notice that while saving, it's only using 50% of my computer's capabilities. Which is at least better than before, because now I can listen to music or watch something or play Minesweeper while I'm waiting without everything trying to go all Jack Frost on me.

But I'm just curious now. Why does Flash take so insanely long to save large files? Is it just that no computer can save a 70MB+ file lickety-split, no matter how its numbers are all around? Is Flash just a slow program? What's the deal? I mean, this new computer won't be completely in vain--it'll serve me well throughout graduate school as not only a computer, but also a DVD player, stereo, work station, and general distraction device--but it doesn't exactly do what I bought it for. Anybody out there able to tell me anything?