Haha Rage, I hope to get enough cash one of these days to build me a system like that. Instead I am usually forced to upgrade a part at a time as my machine needs it.

I know my system was buitla dn optimized for XP, but after working on that for what seems like ever without any problems I somehow crafted up a virus. So I figured I'd format and start clean. I couldn't get XP back to the way it was. So I figured why not optimize and move to Vista? It worked great and I was thrilled. Just recent issues plagued the situation.

As it stands I am looking into upgrading or building a new machine for Vista 64. 64 Bit software has been made available to me (thank god!) and it is looking like I may need it. Plus if I can find financing for a new machine then I can configure this pc into a renderslave along with a few older machines I am getting in the next few weeks. At this point the difference between upgrading my machine and building a bigger better one is only about 700$. So it kinda seems like a logical thing for me to build a new rig all together. If I strip out my hard drives, and dvd burner I can save myself another ~$200 on the new rig.

As for your render slaves, they are simply OS, Ram(how much), video card? network card and a hard drive right?

I haven't found much info on creating render farms for personal use, I found a good article on building one but it doesn't seem to detail those parts in great detail.

Anyways all-in-all if I build a brand new machine it looks like it'll set me back about $1500 for parts with a quad core cpu and 8 gigs of ram. I'll probably also add in $160 for 2 500gb hard drives for raid.