I have two computers: the old one with Pentium III 650, 650 Mb of RAM, 40 Mb HD, Nvidia 32 Mb and Windows 98 SE and the new one with AMD Athlon 1600 XP, 512 Mb of RAM, 60 Mb HD, ATI Radeon 64 Mb and Windows XP. The only programs I cannot run are due to Windows XP, not the processor (but upgrades for XP are coming...)
Athlon is faster and cheaper.
DonM is right about the 7200 rpm hard disk; according to tests made by specialized magazines, the fastest is Maxtor, followed by IBM.
RAM: go for 512. When you run Windows RAM can effect the computer's speed more than the processor itself.
Video card: ATI Radeon (excellent for 3D, 2D and DVD), Nvidia (3D and 2 D) or Matrox (good for 2D only).
Soundcard: I have Creative Live Platinum 5.1 (I like to watch DVDs too), but on this Forum you will find sounder advice about that one too...they say that Creative is not good to make music :-(
One final word: on my old computer I had installed Windows ME but I didn't like it: it tends to create backup files at every startup and so, at the end, it will take up all of your hard disk space, unless you run a program to disactivate this feature. I don't like an operative system that does things that I cannot control (maybe Windows XP does the same, but right now we seem to get along very well).
Good luck!
Andrea


[This message has been edited by Dreamer (edited 01-06-2002).]