That's not what I said...?

I have Premiere. Premiere would work. I just rarely use it because I use more professional software (Avid). I don't recommend it to you because it's really hard to pirate, and prohibitively expensive to anyone who isn't a student. That and it has a very steep learning curve.

Premiere will work just fine. I'm just asking which version you have, because it's possible that between whatever version you have and the one I do (CS4), they changed how one would go about doing a split-screen effect.

In fact, if you didn't know what to work with, I'd have suggested Premiere, as it's fairly powerful, but relatively easy to work with.

So, like I said, what version of Premiere do you have?

--edit--

Aaand I just noticed you said you only have 1GB of RAM. I'd highly recommend at least 2GB, ideally a bit more (I have 4GB), for video editing. That's probably why your system keeps crashing while using Premiere.