:)
Best Buy had a good deal on the Gateway Fx 6860 for 18 months with no interest, with a $99 upgrade to Vista Premium.  This made the computer affordable for me, so I bought it.  Thanks for all the advice.

What antivirus do you reccommend, I have a choice between North and Windows OneCare Live (have serial no. available for either or.  Both work with 64 bit OS.

I'd love to upgrade to 8 gigs of ram, especially for Vue Infinite, but the laptop only allows 4 Gigs (which came preinstalled).  I can run Vista on my XP desktop with 3 gigs of ram, but it gags on large scenes.  i'm hoping the laptop will give me more umph for that application.  I expect that renders will take longer though, the desktop has a 2.4 gig quad core, but I'm hoping I can do bigger scenes and use the reposing and Poser shader tree options better.