Okay then...thanks again all for your informative posts. I have recieved my new uter...am running it as shipped, BUT am currently shopping for the following pieces: 1) an External "one-touch" style back-up USB/firewire drive, probably 400GB, as a means of backing-up my system configuration and reconsolidating the data which will be split onto the two 160GB RAID-0 drives I got. Whew, I got an earful at the technical forum regarding the inherent unreliability (and nominal to non-existent performance gain) associated with RAID-0. I bought here on percieved PRICE...compared to the single 250GB drive option, I went with the two 160GB drives (at 10K instead of 7200)...an extra 70GB for $40. I had not, however, considered the reliability issues related to spliting data across two drives. Now I know. 2) a good PSU, and 3) some extra fans (I'll have to do some research on how I would configure/install them into my system)...the Dell XPS 400 is a kind of Mini-Tower and I'm not entirely sure how much space there is for that stuff. BTW, I ultimately upgraded the included 19" analog flat-panel screen to a 20" wide-screen digital flat-panel for an additional $160...crispy;)