After Effects AE painfully slow and prone to crashes

[adamcreator]

despite a powerful new computer after effects is painfully slow and prone to crashes, often even with 'sorry' messages about it having to crash now. any tips to make it faster and/or more stable? i already use Quarter resolution instead of Full since i prefer speed even if with blurry images. i'm also great at project organization and am not doing anything cumbersome, yet the program acts like a little baby, often while rendering for the ram player preview, and slows down like crazy and often crashes. it also seems to ignore task manager end tasks when frozen, forcing me to wait longer, and then takes a long time to allow me to reopen it, oftentimes just to re-crash after clicking the ram player icon again. i use an i5 quad core 8gb windows 8.1 desktop and after effects cs6

 

[ALB68]

Hi adamcreator,
Welcome to the forum. Is there a question you want to ask or just vent?
Edit: Excuse me..I do see your question now. I am not familiar with After Effects but many here are, so you should receive some replies.
Just a thought though..I would think 8GB of ram would be on the low side for video applications.

 

[Hoogle]

Do you know if it is After effects that is crashing or a 3rd party plugin. Sometimes loading a project which relies on a 3rd party plugin can crash after effects if that part of project is corrupt.