For the present, the video subsystem of your computer has next to nothing to do with poser; the only qualifications to that are 1) it takes CPU cycles to run your video subsystem, so on-board video is a no-no 2) displaying your graphics afterwards obviously needs a video card to be involved somewhere. Operating System: Windows 2000 Professional if you are going with a AMD CPU; Windows XP is to Windows 2000 what Windows ME was to Windows 98se: a prettied up interface that adds nothing except some bugs and higher CPU usage. If you are going for a Intel Hyperthreading CPU, windows 2000 doesn't support hyperthreading; neither does poser, so you won't really see any advantages unless you really like to, for instance, run a web server on the same machine you are running poser on; I would still suggest getting a dual processor AMD setup and Win2k if thats a concern. Win2k-XP can't actually use more than a gig of ram effectively. If you want to blow money on something that will actually boost your performance; I would suggest either a IDE-SATA RAID-5 system (just barely workable) or fast SCSI RAID-5 system; you will have no worries about hard drive crashes and your stuff will just work noticeably faster. MCSE since 2000, in case you are wondering.