My local Fry's Electronics was out of the cheap SSD's. As this is a hobby my wife gave me a budget of $400 bucks for upgrades. Since I have fairly decent equipment (not like Sam or some others) this amount allowed me to double my RAM and get faster HD's.

So, I purchased two new Seagate 500's with 32MB cache and my intention is to Raid0 them. After spending about 10minutes with two of their employees, they talked me out of 1 vel-raptor and recommended that I Raid0 these. Both kids (I'll call them) told me that if they could do it over they would do it this way. The new Seagate Drives utilize some form of new storage technology. I'm not a technical guru so I'm going to go with what they said.

I also purchased 4gbs MORE of Corsair 1600ddr3 memory. I now have 8.

My 1gb video card turns out to be a EVGA 8800GT. I get more than enough FPS when I'm on the ground in a zone...my problem is in Dal and sometimes SW. Since my occasional hiccups seem to be server/hd related, I didn't feel as though I needed to upgrade this atm.

My internet connection is through Time Warner and I have the turbo edition which is more than 22mb download and close to 4 up. Pretty sure I'm not having bandwidth issues there.

Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread. When I get it up and running I'll let you all know how it's working.

My intention now is to install Vista Ultimate and start from scratch.