Vista, eh, I can wait
I'm not downing Vista, but let's face it, when you want to run a new OS you want to be able to use it properly. My 6yr old machine isn't really up to par, which happens to be an AMD XP1700+ /w 768mb of ram & 200 IDE drive.
Oh what's that, the required ram is 512mb? Yea well don't forget the required ram for XP is 128mb but you won't see anybody with half a brain running a machine that way.
I'm looking to rebuild a new machine late this year, I'm either going to purchase the new 45nm Core 2 Duos I mentioned in a previous post, or I'll ride the price reduction on the 65nm Core 2 Duos. I'll also shoot for 2 gigs of ram plus a new SATA hard drive. In my opinion, if you don't have at least 1gb of ram, forget about Vista, and dual core is a very strong recommendation from me as well, you don't want some side service or UI event firing off and causing what you're working on to hickup.