So, BillyBoy, do you recommend buying a faster CPU at the expense of less Ram? The soundblaster card apparently also functions as a 1394 capture card. I agree I don't want bundled anything other than Sonic software. Also is n't a CD drive necessary for loading software, or can the DVD drive do that? Thanks for your response.

The DVD drive will read CDs fine, so you can load your software from that.

Although you will probably be fine with the soundblaster, I really would recommend against it. Get a cheap firewire card (Billyboy's price estimate is a good indication of the MOST you should have to pay for one). For a sound card look at something like the Echo Mia or M-Audio Delta card. If 5.1 mixing is important to you, you will need a multichannel card - maybe the new M-audio 7.1 card ($99?), or the terratec DMX fire. Bear in mind you will obviously need an appropriate amp/speaker set up to deal with the six discreet audio channels.

512MB should be fine, but consider it a minimum. It won't hurt to have 1GB, but you won't lose sleep without it! Not to up to date on CPU cost, but possibly you could stretch to a 2.8 P4 with the money saved? This would probably be of more benifit in terms of render times and inproving the overall responsiveness of Vegas.

The difference between a 2.53 and 2.8 P4 would be hardly noticeable. A 3.06 P4 would show a noticeable improvement, but it is too expensive.

I would recommend you stay with 2.53, or even a 2.4, as long as it's got a 533 MHz front side bus. Is the 333 MHz memory the fastest Gateway offering? Go with the fastest, and buy what you can afford. You never know how memory hungry your other programs can get.

BillyBoy and ibliss are correct, Vegas does not require high end video and sound card. I would stay away from soundblaster as well. They have very unstable drivers. Last time I checked their card with firewire port, I could not tell if their firewire implementation was OHCI compliant, which is required by Vegas, I believe.

Priority wise I would rank the CPU speed as the highest IF waiting long times for rendering bugs you. If not, no need really. My aging 1.6 CPU is plenty fast for me an avrage about 8 to 1 for rending to AVI. As others said I wouldn't go for the fastest chip because that's always a premium price for only a tad more speed, but do get the fastest chip your budget allows. Next to that I would get at least one BIG drive. You never have enough hard drive space when you're doing video editing. Also consider using removable drawers. I've gone that route for years now and really like it. I don't know, I lost count I think combined I got something like 700 GB or so storage.

With the setup I got, and keeping 98SE, I'll look to upgrade my CPU eventually, my mem is fine, and I can look to future upgrades of my SOFO prods(and updates to what I have now)...prolly AMD all the way tho...hey, my crappy ol' Emagic AW2 is OK also, at least for what I do...