I've found that the mouse is not a replaceable item if you're into modeling. While the Tablets do allow you to do texturing and some things.. there is a learning curve with using a tablet to the full abilities. So both is a better bet. Now, industry standard is Wacom. (their site seems to have trouble this morning, but I believe that's the correct URL). There are a number of clones which seem to be pretty good, but already having a Wacom, it seems kind of silly for me to go testing the others. ;) As for any other special hardware, each of these packages come with their own list of Minimum system requirements. Normally if you have a PIII 500+ with around 128megs of RAM and at least 10gigs (for textures, images, etc.) of HD space, you should be fine.. not fast.. but workable. Anything above this would be great. Some programs, like Maya, Lightwave, etc., work a WHOLE lot better under NT (NT4, Win2k, XP). Then you have to deal with the system requirements for the OS. Hope that helps. :) - James

The doctor says I have way too much blood in my caffeine system.