Sony Vegas 11 rendering slow, help?

I've had sony vegas movie studio HD 11 for some time now, and render times have always been around 2.5X the video length for 480p resolution videos. I always thought it was my computer but i recently upgraded it to a bigger pc with AMD FX 6300, AMD Radeon R9 270X Graphics card, 8Gb of ram and all of my footage is stored on an external USB3.0 hard drive. Im using Sony vegas 11 (Not the pro/ platinum version) I have no interest in getting Vegas 12 or 13 nor have the money to upgrade to the pro or platinum versions any help would be massively appreciated.
Thanks, Taurinid.

Hey Taurinid,
I have Sony Vegas Pro 11 but maybe I can try to help. What codec are you rendering as? .wmv, .mov, .mp4? Some of these types of files are much bigger than others even at 480p. Also, what size to the files that you render end up being? If they're more than 1gb than usually rendering takes a long time. I would do some research on which file type is the smallest and try rendering out that way.
Stephanie