That Athlon CPU is pretty good. A graphics card with good OpenGL support is nice, but not essential. More RAM is definitely essential. Go for at least 1 GB, more is better. A fast harddisk sure helps. More on graphics cards: nVidia is a bit of a letdown with their later consumer series. Great gaming cards, but the OpenGL support isn''t as good as it could be. My old Ti4200 performs almost as well as the my new Geforce 6800LE under OpenGL (DirectX is another matter). Another system with an ATI9600Pro has had quite a bit of OpenGL troubles. If you're going to use this machine as a graphics workstation, and you have the money, you could go for a nVidia Quadro board. Expensive, but excellent OpenGL support (you'll love it if you also work with other 3D apps that make extensive use of OpenGL, like Vue or modeling apps). They're NOT good for gaming. But your first priority should be RAM. Next, a second harddisk.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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