Personally I stay with Intel chips... I just prefer the engineering path Intel is on. Currently, though you can get a better "bang for the buck" with AMD chips. P4 is good from intel, though Dell will ship you a nice Xeon system as well :) About 3 years ago I gave up building systems for myself and clients in favor of the machines from Dell. Yes, they are more expensive but I really like the fact that things simply work out of the box - I am damn good at what I do when building systems but my time is worth more than tracking down a driver or IRQ problem. I would put XP on it. Personally I use the features in XP Pro's networking so I need that but XP Home is a fine system for most folks. XP is definately the OS of choice for PC's these days... the long testing period resulted in an extremely stable system.