Ooookay...... (crick, crack) Here's what I have observed with my rendergarden in the past. The weakest machine is an Athlon 700 slot A with all of 166megs of PC-100 SDram; the current strongest is an XP-1800 with 760megs of PC2100 DDR ram. The smallest HDD is 20 gigs, the largest 40gigs. All use 10-100 NIC interfaces. Where RAM is most critical is in the main system, the one where Vue itself is installed on. The tiny little Athlon 700 has loaded and rendered a Mover 5 test scene just fine (and the dynamics eat memory as readily as large textures). In the satellite computers, you just need reasonable amount of memory, and a large hard disk to supply a large swap file for the RenderCow to use. On the unit that actually runs Vue, and will become the HyperVue network manager, the rules are a bit different. It's doing a potential 5 node management of data transfer (even after you send the textures, scene update info is sent to the cows), running the actual Vue app, handling the OS and the network interfacing, and as most people install that 1st RenderCow on the system with Vue (as Vue itself will not render anything when it is functioning as the manager), you have those resources to manage, as well. Plus the fact at least some of Poser is activated to import the Poser animation content, and Poser is not real good about shutting itself back off (for that matter, it may not be able to; the Poser.exe could be needed for the dynamics processing). So you need a big HDD for the swapfile, and a decent amount of RAM (if using VuePro, consider 1 gig the first sweet spot; and more is always good). Vue 4 doesn't have the same kinds of interfacing with the OS that Pro does, so it uses a bit less of a memory footprint; 512megs is probably the first sweet spot, with 1 gig being significantly robust. The lunchbox units are a good choice; they do all you need. What you will want to do is invest in a 4 unit KVM switch; that way one keyboard, mouse, and monitor will suffice for all 4 boxes (and you can get one really cheap on pricewatch.com). If they do not have integrated video, hit a computer show and find someone dumping a bunch of Jaton 4 meg cards. They are cheap, and do the job. You can also save a little more by forgoing the floppy drive, and only using one CD drive, and physically moving it between boxes; once the OS, drivers, and apps are installed, it becomes unnecessary. One thing to keep in mind is that the HyperVue controller is a bit sensitive to packet collision. You can easily crash Vue if you try to fire up all the Cows at the same time, and at the same places; either sending textures, or sending scene files. This is easily avoided by simply starting one Cow at a time, and waiting until it is actually rendering a frame before adding another Cow. I'm running Win2k SP2 on all my garden boxes (although I finally succumbed and have a copy of XP Pro to put on one of them to experiment with) and have had no trouble. You -may- have to go to the microsoft site and get one of the Visual C++ runtime dlls, if your system doesn't install it for you. And make sure to run a copy of Norton's WinDoctor (or equivalent) to clean up all the dangling bits that Windows always leaves behind. That will save you no end of troubles.