That's cool. Here are my current recommendations for setting **** up (whether you want it or not). If you want to be able to play future games better, get an i7 quad. If you want modern and older games to run better, get a Core 2 Duo. Get a GeForce 260/Radeon HD 5750 or better. Go with 4GB RAM and 32-bit or more with 64-bit. Make sure to get a good case that won't start vibrating after a year or so. Stock cooling should be fine unless you overclock or something. Go with an Asus motherboard, no exceptions. Get two nice, big hard drives and set up RAID 0; consider making a good partitioning scheme with the OS and most of your programs on one partition, and portable programs and data/documents on another; possibly make a third for large files and a fourth small partition with just your temp folder assigned to it. Turn off access writes on all volumes, and potentially consider turning off file indexing if you don't need to use find much (you can still use it with indexing off, but it's slower). For your OS, 7 SP1 will probably be out by the time you finish building it, so definitely go with 7 (I can get you a copy if you need one and don't ask questions), unless you really don't plan to play many future games, in which case go with an nLited XP to squeeze those last few frames out.