Because you're using win me, I have to assume you're not doing any heavy lifting in your daily activities. Here's a rough overview of the way things work. This is a time of change in the industry so many really nice machine builds will be less expensive soon. The mother board is the soul of the machine , everthing else plugs into it and ain't going any faster than the mother bd. lets it. It will say533/800 FSB. (front side bus) Get the 800, this is the speed the MB moves stuff around. Intel P 4, 3gig,1mb cache, the 1mb cache is important because this is the mem on the pcu chip that is used first. Hyperthreadind is good although many turn it off. The only charts I'm aware of that are engineered for hyperthreading are Laurence Chans Neoticker but it does help my Sierra charts. DIMM memory slots, the board should be capable of minimun 2 gigs of pc3200 x 400 DDR2. DDR2 is another way of saying dual channel. Dual is faster than plain DDR. Because of all the programs you may be using 2 gigs could be necc., especially with many java apps running at same time. I.E, charts, chat room, news feeds, etc. to keep the machine running smoothly SATA hard drives, faster than IDE . Any new board will have this. High powerd video cards are not necc as charts don't render as fast as video games, 64 bits are fine. Video cards running many monitors also can eat up system memory. You need to study this stuff untill you have a handle as the combos are endless. IMO these are also nice machines. http://www.cyberpowersystem.com/ I would add that it is quite amazing the computing power that can be had for the money these days, don't be afraid to spend a little more, it will serve you well in the long run.
Thanks, I'll give it a go. Can always go back to another computer for the platform, but for some reason I like the idea of it being all off one mouse instead of switching.
Ok, so far I'm looking at the Dell 8400 3.2ghz with 1GB ddr2 ram, 80 gb hd. I will eventually be buying a pair of 19" planars, so is it a good idea that I opted for the cheapest video card (radeon x300) for now, and will look to add a dual-dvi card when monitors come in? Oh, and any need for floppy drive or usb memory key if you have dvd and cd-rw drives?