The man's a total ass, so the occasional cutting of the cheese in public is to be expected.

Ouch

Acadia, you have two paths to follow: custom built or off the shelf name brand. SInce you appear to be more of a software oriented person rather than tech enthusiast, may I suggest you consider purchasing a Dell desktop? ( No, I don't work for Dell or own any of their stock.)
I'd try giving their website a careful perusal, then give them a call at their toll free number. Tell the rep exactly how you plan to use your computer to avoid going through an endless list of available configurations. You'll want two gigs of memory, and an AGP profile video card with at least 256 megs of onboard ram. Since you're a Poser user, I'd opt for as large a hard drive as I could afford. Whether you go for a dual core or not is your call, but I'd seriously consider a dc motherboard to prevent your system from becoming obsolete before it's out of the box.
Dell also offers the option of purchasing a refurbished system that can be upgraded to meet your needs. You may also wish to check with friends and relatives since many businesses have discount plans with Dell that allow employees to purchase their systems at appreciable discounts. For example, my brother receives a ten per cent discount on all his Dell purchases through the company he works for. 
Good luck.

Baumgarten Enterprises has lots of ruined buildings for download in the free models section. They're all in 3DS format and are easily imported to Poser.

Thanks, Acadia. I have the updates for P5 burned on a cd somewhere. I'll have to look for 'em, although it would probably just be easier to download them again.

Has the gap grown wider? Yes. No...wait a minute....no.

Seriously, I do detect something of a dissonance between the two companies. Perhaps DAZ has plans to release a fully featured program of its own to compete with Poser. Wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened.

I wouldn't call Alienware products junk,  pjz99, but they are overpriced and the desktops tend to be loud, making all sorts of annoying whirring and humming noises. I must admit ignorance regarding their notebooks.
I was just looking at Falcon's newest gaming PC that boasts a list price of over $7000.00. Now that's just plain crazy. I could put together a fantastic rig for less than a quarter of that price. Must be a brand prestiege thing  for snobs.
Good luck with your purchase, burchigb.

Excellent!!! Downloaded and saved them so I can watch again.

I've had no problems with stability and the render speed is a great improvement. The only real complaint I have is that it seems to take significantly longer to clear a scene than in previous releases, and the interface reaction when manipulating dials or working in the view portal sometimes appears to be less responsive than what I've grown accustomed to.

 Another feature I appreciate is the ease of adding additional runtimes. A few mouse clicks and you're finished. Overall, this is an excellent initial release.

The muscles beneath the skin give an excellent effect of real dynamic mass. This looks to be really promising. Well done.

Trekkie Grrrl and Kozaburo. I use at least one of their contributions in almost every render. Not only is the work they do outstanding, but they very generously give almost all of it away at no cost. It's that spirit of creativity and generosity that have made Poser so popular.

I was rather disappointed after my first hands on trials, but since it was a birthday gift and didn't cost me a cent, I can afford to be generous with my criticsms. We won't really know the model's true capabilities until the talented and generous members here at Renderosity begin releasing morphs, hair, textures and clothing. That's what will ultimately account for V4's success or failure.

Judy=elephant man. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH....I nearly burst my spleen laughing at that one! 

A dual core may give Poser 7 a slight boost in speed, but only if the programmers have implemented routines to take advantage of the chip architecture. Then there's the happy fact that Intel has already released its first generation quad core cpu, which means the available duals are already obsolete. From my experience, installing the maximum amount of memory and the best video card your motherboard will allow always yields the greatest performance results with any graphics intensive application.

Thanks to everyone for the help!