This is the year i cast off the shackles and chains of 32 bit computation. I have used my refund from our good friends at the internal revenue service to upgrade.
After much handwringing on base specs, i settled on:
Intel® Core™ i7 920 Processor (4x 2.66GHz/8MB L3 Cache)
ASUS P6T SE -- Intel X58 Chipset CrossFire Supported w/8-ch HD Audio, Triple-Channel DDR3, Gb LAN, S-ATA Raid, USB 2.0, 3 PCI-E MB
3 GB [1 GB X3] DDR3-1333 Triple Memory Module - Corsair XMS3 Dominator w/
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 - 2GB - Single Card
CoolerMaster HAF 922 Mid Tower case
Running win7 with all the bells and whistles.
This should be still pretty good box in 5 years i am guessing.
Already have a migration of data plan in place for my pair of machines, as wife/kids get my current box (amd duel core 4800+, 2 gig ram, pair of 7800 gtx nvidia in sli)
It gonna take a bit, but I can xfer all the data back and forth keep spouse happy not loosing her stuff.
For my SFC-OP needs gonna use my 200 gig spare drive as an "XP Only" boot device and install it to that drive and boot to it when I want to play around in xp os mode and play sfc. (or any other thing that wont run in windows 7 that might interest me)
Any advice on getting the best bang for tricking out the system for Seti or win7 in general would be helpful ...since i have the xtra horsepower, it would be nice to kick my out put up and I am certain someone has advice i could put into use.