Cinnamon, if you haven't obtained it yet, you might want to consider Windows 2000. It won't have all the eyecandy and 'special features' that XP has, but under the hood they are essentially the same. And Win2k doesn't require activation, just the good ol serial number. And dual booting is much nicer with Win2k, if you want to retain the 9x compatibility. As for the CPU wars, the last Intel chip I owned was a 386SX-40. It was also the first and last computer I bought assembled. Been building them ever since, and been AMD all the way. Well, for instance; one render I did had 4 Poser characters (Mike, Vicki, PS kid, and PT kid), three sets of Travellers faun legs and horns, two of Steffy ZZ's system killer textures, and slightly more benign hi res for the others, imported into Vue 4 into a scene with 2 of the flowering cherry trees, multiple hills, a couple of fill lights...all told over 255 items, and in excess of 4,000,000 polygons. My XP-1700 handled the load just fine. Had to boost my swap file up to a gig, but... ;) AMD has the best cost/performance ratio, and as others have said, you can take the money you save on that and put it elsewhere, like more ram, or multiple hard drives. Don't worry about things like '3D-Now' or MMX or SSE-2; they are essentially the same thing, unique instructions that have been added to the standard X-86 code base, and registers added to the actual CPU, that permit certain graphics and audio processing calls to bypass the longer pipelines in processing and speed up response time. Their usage spotty at best, and they are still more marketing tools than anything else. They work, but they aren't considered something neccesary.