The best Hard drives I've ever used are IBM, Quantum and Western Digital. I've had 3 Maxtor drives fail in the first year of use and 2 Seagates go bad that didn't last much longer. NVidias most current video card versions are GeForce types. ATI brand video cards are great to and thier most current versions go by the Radeon name. Make sure the video card you get has 32Mb to 64Mbs of its own RAM on it. All graphics programs need that. I use bothe Intel and AMD CPUs. I'd stay with the Intel P4 or the AMD XP. (Avoid the intel Celeron though. I wanted to kill it for being so slow.) Your computers RAM should be HIGH. WinXP REQUIRES at least 256Mb RAM so you need more than that to run your 3D programs well. Sales people are most often not familiar with what 3D Programs need so 512Mb RAM is a starting point. Many here claim to be using over 1Gb of RAM. (I've gone almost that high)