Troubleshooting My Workstation [Upgrade Needed?]

premiere works differently than AE, maya, and other software, so be careful chasing premiere performance advice/guides if you are using other software. AE (and i think Maya) often only use 2-4 cpu cores, while premiere and some other software can use more. if AE and maya are your primary programs then you might focus on upgrading the current computer by adding some sata ssd's for an os drive, scratch drive, and media/projects drive, and more ram to at least 32gb. its likely the computer could also run a pcie m.2 ssd with a pcie adapter if you wanted to go that route.

if you wanted to increase the cpu performance the newer intel i7 4 core cpu's have higher clock speeds, 4.2ghz base and 4.5ghz turbo. which will make them around 10-20% faster, but also require a new computer or motherboard (and one capable of running two video cards). 6-8 core cpu's can offer more performance in some software like premiere, but those cpu's also have lower clock speeds which will hurt performance in software like AE, photoshop, etc.

i would have the IT dept look over the computer to see if they can find out why its locking up and crashing. if they don't find anything wrong, then you might ask them to do a clean install of windows or revert to factory state. which might fix software issues but you would also have to reinstall your software. you would also need backups of your files before they do that.

Bill, thank you so much for the in depth reply and information. This is exactly the kind of additional information I need to be able to justify my purchase outside of our departments specifications. I am out of the office until Monday but I will try to follow up with the results as soon as possible.

Thanks again!

1. That is only a four core Xeon with not much more power than my laptop. 
2. The single hard disk drive is below minimum requirements
3. This day and age for Premiere Pro you should have one SATA III SSD for the OS and Applications, then one super speed M.2 SSD like a Samsung 960 Pro or (second choice) EVO for your projects and media.  Hard disk drives are only good for backup and archiving/
4. If you want to demonstrate how your your system performs you might want to look at my Premiere Pro BenchMark (PPBM) and test your system.  After you download and unzip PPBM there are four tests, one for the storage disk system and two tests for the GPU, and one for the CPU only.  On that same site you can see results from many other systems.
5. I will try to comment back to you on your results.
6. I bet that Dell has many unnecessary processes running on that computer look at the performance tab of Task Manager, how many processes?

Additionally, as much as I support the idea of building a pc myself, the company would strongly insist we bought a pre-built computer so if there are any recommendations for a new pre-built rig I would love feedback