I haven't seen anyone talking about AMD processors. Anyone have experience with them and EW'09 or EW6?
Here's my setup:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3GHz
RAM: 3.5GB
Graphics: nVidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost
HD: Seagate ST1500DM003 1.5TB 7200rpm SATA
OS: Windows 7 Pro

I've noticed that when using 720p MPG-1 video as a song background, the hard drive light is on solid (accessing the HD continuously) Sometimes the video stutters if (i assume) anything else needs to access the hard drive. I have at least version 10.x of the K-lite codecs.
Is that normal?

The two most likely reasons for disk activity are reading large amount of video data and Windows paging memory to disk. Reading should not affect video playback. However paging would affect performance because it involves reading and writing program data.

I am guessing you are using Windows 7 32-bit, which is why you're only seeing 3.5 GB of memory. So you can't increase memory to alleviate the memory paging performance drag. It's also an older CPU which uses DDR2 memory which is slower than the current DDR3 memory and just released DDR4 memory. The computer is struggling to handle HD video.

I have used the newer AMD APUs (A-8, A-10) with 720p videos without stuttering, running Windows 7 64-bit with 8GB of DDR3 1600 MHz memory.

I am guessing you are using Windows 7 32-bit, which is why you're only seeing 3.5 GB of memory.

No, it's 64-bit Win 7, and it really is 3.5 GB of DDR2 memory. It had 2GB of PC2-5300, and then our computer guy added another 1GB + 512MB of PC2-4300. I just realized that the computer will downclock to the slowest memory type.

It's a hodgepodge of a PC right now and I'm going to request that we upgrade it to the EW6 recommended level with 8GB of DDR3 and SSD.