I essentially agree with you Odiemance on the virtues of P5....I have it....I like it. However, I have a 1.7ghz Pentium 4 and 512 SDRAM. I run Windows XP. It works fine on my machine, but the rendering is slow and when your runtimes get big, that slows it down even more. It really depends, I think, on your "patience level". If you can tolerate a slower response to your tasking, then you can probably run P5 at the minimum requirements recommended by CL: Windows 98/ME, 500 Mhz pentium, 128 ram, 24bit color at 1024x768 resolution and 500 mb free hard disk space. Even CL "recommends" at least a 700 mhz processor and 256 mb of ram. By the way, you will not be able(from what I've read on numerous posts)to run P5 if your resolution is less than 1024x768. So.....I would recommend that the poster take all the posts into consideration and decide if he/she is a patient person who does not require everything to "quick". I do prefer "quick"......which is why I would not recommend less than 512 ram.