Since thats the case, my main guess is that the Q6600 is an ancient installation on Windows/whatever you have. I think the OS install sounds hosed, literally No hard drive can be that slow, and your network card shouldn't be that bad. I recommend giving your Q6600 a fresh installation of Windows... 4 cores on the Q6600 should be able to dominate a Pentium 4 if Premiere is a multi-threaded program.