... May be this will help.
When I first decided I wanted to direct, people told me that editing would make me a better shooter.(you care more about how you shoot if you have to fix crap that didn't have to be there) I am a geek at heart and play with hardware for fun. I built a very fast duo core windows box from the ground up,board, processor, ram and several drives in a raid for the storage of large video files and jacked the current version of Premier off of Limewire.There was plenty of info out there for a beginner and I waded in.
First thing I noticed was whenever I had a question, whoever I called was using Final Cut. The terminology was the same so after translating their help to how it applied to Premier for better or worse I was on my way.
At this point I discover that rendering video is an intensive use of ram and processors, add to that the fact that windows uses a lot of ram and processor, I had to over-clock my box to be efficient. The result of that was very high temps. and an unstable os. I burned out expensive processors and spent as much time trying to find a balance and repairing things and asking for help as I did editing video. A friend stepped in and introduced me to Vegas on his beefy hardware and things began to come together.
I shot and cut some scenes for a company which then asked me to make some changes to fit their needs. The adjustments were some of the after effects available in... You guessed it... FINAL CUT...
I gave in. Or up however you want to look at it. I went out and bought my first Mac,(an old dual 450) and learned that Macs smaller os used less ram and processor and allowed for a much smoother work-flow and now whenever an issue arose everyone knew what I was talking about and I was prepared to do what was asked of me. That Mac was stable and ran cool but was slow. Render times is a big deal. Sitting around and waiting to see how changes you make have turned out is reason enough to want to minimize that hassle in the beginning. The purchase of that Mac also negated every dime I had spent hardware-wise up to that point
Next came "Lizzie" my dual 1ghz mirror-door. I out fitted with a Matrox i/o box and a Final Cut controller and a deck(dont want to be using your camera as a deck)The dual 1ghzs and 2gigs of ram had me rendering in REAL TIME which is as fast as is possible regardless of how much money you spend, how many cores you have or anything else. Real time means it happens when you do it..
There are other ways to cut video as well such as non-linear. Which is even easier but doesn't provide all of the bells and whistles you get with digital.
I would have saved my self a lot of time and money if i had just started out doing what everyone else in my profession was doing in the beginning...
I also suggest checking out the Pro-video boards.There is a lot of good intel in them.