I'm a huge fan of XP and feel crippled on a 9x box. If your tech is experienced, I wouldn't worry about the upgrade. My only suggestions: Have at least a half-gig of RAM. If you like to run Photoshop and Poser at the same time (such as when texturing), then a full gig of RAM is a good idea. Also, I would ask the tech not to convert the C drive's (where the operating system resides) FAT32 partition to NTFS. I can't explain the reasoning behind this without offering pathetic geek lingo, so I'll just say it is a matter of convenience.