Been away for a while and perusing the tech forum threads.

Also keep forgetting to check the box to email when a reply is made.

Oh well.

Just to answer some questions:

A 32 bit (x86) OS can only address 3.25 GB of RAM. It may see 4GB, but, it can only address 3.25GB. A 64-bit OS can address 16 GB of RAM and is used if you are using high end rendering, such as Adobe Photoshop, 3D Max, Poser or some other engineering software that requires a lot of horse power.

If you require more than 2 GB to do normal day to day stuff, you have some underlying issues that need to be addressed.

If you are looking to have a home network that can be accessed remotely, get a Windows Home Server with a minimum of 2 TB of storage. These are incredibly simple to set up and are headless (no need of a monitor). Once it's on your network and you pop in the set up CD on another PC, you can set it up.

For high end graphics, use nVidia cards. Nothing short of a 9600 GT with at least 512 MBs of DDR3, or better yet get 200 series.

The new I7 processors are out, but I would wait for another 6 months before going that route.

My system is custom built:

Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
nVidia 9800 GT w/512 MB DDR3 RAM graphics card
8 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 RAM
2 TB of storage.
MSI Neo II Broadwater motherboard 1066 MHz Front Side Bus, over clocked to 1333 MHz
Zalman CPU fan
800 watt power supply unit

Performance rating is 7.5 out of 7.9. Hard drive read/write access being the weakest link; wish I had a Raptor hard drive :-) That's 10,000 RPMs

Does just fine. Cost? About $800

Why do I need the horse power? Because I use Adobe Photoshop and Poser 3D.

Any questions, drop me a lin at steve@thelaymanscorner.com or stevelemaster@gmail.com