I just assembled a PC

I went for the AMD Athlon 64 because it is fast and one step down from the Athlon XP which is server oriented. I opted for 3 Gig on the grounds of cost - faster and it gets ridiculous, give it a year or two and they will be jelly bean prices and I can get 25 % boost by buying a new CPU.

Burner is a Lite-On DVD 2 layer dual format. LG have a three format 2 layer but the vendor didn't stock them on reli
ablity grounds, I may not use 2 layer for a year or two but when the market moves I am ready to experiment.

I got a floppy (essential in a crash) but this one had a built-in 7 in one card reader which eats one USB but looks like two drives.

Because the Graphics is a TV I got a 250 gig SATA but there is a 40 IDE for the systems, I do video editing so fast HDDs are essential.

Win98 (for backward compatibility of any legacy software) and Win 2K because there is no "must have" on XP & I don't fancy all the named driver switch-off of SP2 (Norton disabled on security grounds - believe it)

If you have a free choice - consider the cards reader and dula layer DVD as future proof (of sorts).