Over a year ago when i used to work at the 3D animation department at an art school, the class/lab computers were at dual Xeon 2GHz cpus, 1 GB memory, and Windows 2000. And had Maya, Lightwave, Houdini, 3DMax, Premiere, and After Effects installed and some students have had 2-3 programs running at the same time. Now, where I currently work, most users are using the office apps and going through the internet to industry specific sites. Lately, I've been doing research and building servers. And it's quite enlightning about the different OS's and memory limitiations. Like, wow, I can go over 4GB of memory? SWEET! Of course, gotta have the right OS. Had to rebuild 2 servers from Windows Server 2003 Standard to Windows Server 2003 Enterprise. Of course, still can't use the 64-bit version because the 64-bit version of the software application hasn't been planned yet  cough JDE cough

I guess it's prety much speculatiing on if the next software version will be 64-bit, etc.