I never worked on any non-NT Windows products for any length of time. My first computer at home was an NT3 workstation for doing Photoshop and Lightwave. What little I used 95, 98, ME, I hated. What junk. The NT kernel is very stable. About the only thing that can hurt it is bad drivers. That was a problem on NT3. Drivers. Now with XP, it's the best of both worlds. You get the NT kernel, with a nice, friendly "front end" plugged on to it. At work, I've used UNIX since 1991. Before that, big IBM mainframes. Never had a computer at home before 1995. UNIX is okay. Rarely crashes. It'll hang, though. And it's a huge pain memorizing all that unintuitive code. I'm told linux is like Unix for x86 boxes. Ugh. I'll take XP, thanks. Back to the topic, though. I'd buy a graphics card with 512 Meg on it, if I had the money to spare. If you work with big scenes, you need all you can get for your OpenGL previews. I've got a Radeon X800 XT with 256Meg right now. I want MORE! If you don't work with huge scenes, I wouldn't spend the dough.