Thanks so much for the replies. I'm starting to get a better picture of how this is going to work.

It's been 10 years or so since I've been inside the guts of a PC. I used to obsess about this stuff when I was a kid (windows 95 and the dawn of 3d graphics processors; I think i had an 8meg Diamond Monster something or another), so I'm a bit nervous of putting it together myself. It won't be a store bought HP or some other such nonsense. I'll try have one put together for me if I feel like I can trust the people at the components store, or I'll give it a shot myself. Worst case scenario is finding someone at work to help me assemble it. The big problem is making sure I purchase the correct components. Oh, and the fact my operatining system will not be in English. I won't be able to understand a damn thing when installing unfamiliar stuff.

I'm skeptical about Vista. I bought a laptop recently from the Taiwan company Acer, and I've had lots of problems with WOW. The "Graphics enchancement" will crash and the whole computer will get the blue screen forcing me to turn it off. It happens once a week on average, and I'm having a hard time getting Vista to patch the updates for it or for the network adapter. Laptops are just a big pain in the ass.

Laptop stats [Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz, 800 Mhz FSB, 4 MB l2 cache, 8600M GT GeForce, 2 GB Ram]

Plus I remember putting this on Dualview before in Vista. I think the laptop is decent, but when I opened up two copies of WOW, it slows to an absolute crawl. I ended up using that, and a 3+ year old laptop to dual box with Keyclone and fell in love with the idea. But I really wanna bring all 5 toons into one machine.

So I was reading else where about Vista having problems when using dualview whereas horizontal span on XP is nicer. I can't remember who it was, but there is a post that talks about someones beastly machine and as soon as he puts one copy of wow on his Dualview'd monitor space the whole setup slows down to about half speed. Is this the same performance hit I can expect if I get XP?

Multi-boxing is such a big investment, and a good plan is crucial. I just don't wanna make costly mistakes and I'm so glad there are knowledgable people willing to help in this forum. Thanks a ton guys!