Doing other things while Edius renders?

[Case]

I know this is an old thread, but I ran across it while searching for something else.

I have two older PC's tucked away under my edit workstation. I also have a keyboard activated switch (four ports, one being unused), which allows me to share one keyboard, one mouse, and one monitor between the three (the Edius editor gets two monitors, the others only one).

Any time I need to, I tap-tap-tap the sequence on the keyboard to switch to the PC I wish to operate. One PC is a tower full of DVD burners, which also does label printing, etc. The other is a P4 HT machine that does label printing, Photoshop, AE, etc. quite well. The main drawback is that I have to fall back to a single monitor, which isn't much of a handicap with the size and resolution of monitors these days.

Try a keyboard-mouse-monitor sharing switch. Mine is a Starview 4 port, SV-411 by Startech.com. They're really quite inexpensive.

[SoundFreak]

I normally close all windows of edius except the player / recorder, make it single (normaly dual player) and render out from there.
That leaves me with 80% free desktop space on 2 monitors and that's great.
The render dialog window I hide at the bottom so that in my work flow with many windows open I can not close the renderer by accident, Just need to see the progress bar not the cancel button.

When I do a 2 hour timeline render I tested that It take about 10% longer time to render when using other Apps. that take a lot of cpu power, like audio editing & graphic work, but your productivity goes up so it's all good.

edit : The only application that runs alone (no multi tasking) is DVD workshop2 while rendering the output file, if other apps. are also running I often get audio/video sync problems in the multiplex stage, this software needs to be alone. All others no problem so far.