Okay, so I went from 32 bit xp w/ 4 gig installed ram to 64 bit Vista with 8 gig installed ram. No SSD yet but the results were amazing. I had a blast in Wintergrasp and also got to cruise around Dal for the first time with all 5 accounts and didn't freeze or really stutter at all. My keyclone also works better as keystrokes don't seem to cause undue lagging when i hold down movement keys. (before, if i held forward, all toons would get stuck running forward for an extra few seconds and other key inputs wouldn't really be recognized). In case you didn't see above, i have a geforce 280, Q9550 (2.8ghz quad core)cpu, and regular disk hard drive.

Here's the stats.
Old specs with 4 gig installed ram
Normal Xp 32 idle: ~450 meg RAM usage
5 boxing xp ~2 meg RAM usage (caps at 2.2 usage in DAL, tournament, and WG, and also freezes up a lot there)
CPU usage~ 30% on all 4 cores (i think i was bottlenecked by ram and cpu wasn't having to work hard)

New specs with 8gig installed ram and Vista 64
Vista 64 idle ~1.4 gig RAM usage
5 boxing ~5.7 gig RAM usage (peaks at about 6.2 gig usage in Dal, wg, tournament)
CPU usage ~50% most places, 90-95% on all 4 cores idle in DAL

lesson learned: get 64 bit windows and minimum 8 gigs ram.

I'd love to see it on highspeed 12 gigs ram, but it was too much money to buy the extra 2 4 gig sticks.