A rather belated thank you to everyone for the hardware advice. In June I went for an 'off the shelf' machine from Mesh: core 2 quad (9450), 8Gb RAM, nVidia 9600GT and 1TB drive.

I installed Vista Ultimate 64 bit version, spent a few weeks finding drivers, tweaking settings and testing all the software I need to get stuff done. After a several months I can declare myself well pleased with the new toy.

Vue 6 Infinite is rock steady these days and very nippy though not as fast as Cinema 4D which flies along. I can at last have multiple apps open and operating at the same i.e. PhotoShop + Vue + Outlook + XYPlorer + others. Bliss.

Single downside, apart from the lack of drivers for my Canon flatbed and neg scanners, is that under Vista 64 Vue 6 Infinite can no longer read SketchUp's native .skp format. I might install a virtual instance of XP Pro to get around that. So much software, so little time.

Cheers,
Mark

Cheers,
Mark