Don't scrimp on critical components. I spend extra on things like power supplies, memory, and hard drives. It hurts the wallet up front, but pays in the long run. I would not put a thirty-dollar power supply in a machine.

I'm still running Win2000, but its days are numbered. Fortunately, I haven't been doing a lot of real high-end processing lately, so it hasn't been an issue. With your job, that obviously isn't going to be the case.

Win2000 is not grumpy about registration like XP is, but I'm running a few applications in the three to four-figure range that are very tightassed about multiple installations.

I would wait on Vista for a while.