I have been absorbing Dale's advice in this thread and on another, and also read ynsaen's incredibly intense tutorial "Five Things." Plus I've been googling and researching and made a call to my PC Club guy.

And...I've come to almost the exact recommendation of svdl above.

I'm going to get almost EXACTLY the sys he/she describes. I had pretty much decided.

AMD Athlon 64 3500 S939 512K, OEM $272.00

GIGABYTE GA-K8NSU-939 nF3 250U ATX $129.99 Info page here.

4 x 1024MB Corsair DDR400 TwinX Dual Memory (TWINX1024-3200XL) Unit price: $299.99 $1,199.96

36GB Western Digital 10,000rpm SATA (WD360GD) Unit price: $129.99 $259.98

Fortunately, I already have a great keyboard, mouse, speaker, video card (MSI StarForce NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 with AGP8X) and monitor (Sony GDMFW900 24" CRT). Unless you guys have any comments, I'll figure out the case (350W power supply) and cooling issues at PCClub.

Still, that adds up to $1901.00 (Yikes!) plus a new seat of Poser5 ($99.00) and bill gates share is not in there yet.

Win XP, but Pro or Home, does it matter? I have only worked with home.

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