Computer part help

Get as much ram as you can, 4gig, video cards, high in ram also.
A new computer, Dual Cores 2htz or higher.

Working with a photo editor, you need speed, not lag. You will also need to create a scratch disc for the photo editor to work in.

Honestly I have a lot of really lame reasons for just sticking with PC, the main one is that I know how to use one   I don't have the time or patience to learn something new no matter how simple.  I have too much on my plate (make that a paper plate, please, less dishes to wash, thank you very much).

Mike, I have an AMD in my desktop and an Intel in my laptop, it seems that they leapfrog back and forth between which one has the most up-to-date Neat-O model available.  Regardless, I guess I will do fine with the latest of whichever is available then, right?

RAM is cheap, btw, memory in general is dirt cheap.  We have gone through 5 computers (including laptops) during the course of our marriage and each new one we get we are so amazed at the amount of memory it has - then we quickly fill it up   And that's WITHOUT storing all the wedding photos on them, those go on external drives.

*perks up ears* Explain, please!

When PS runs out of memory it starts using a scratch disk.  Most computers only have one drive so the scratch disk, photoshop, your images, and any applications are all on the same physical disk. 

If you have a separate disk as your scratch disk then it should be a little faster. 

Don't know where you are looking but buy.com is usually the first place I look if I'm ordering online. 

The hard drive can also be partitioned, say into 3, one of the three can become the scratch disc.
I have an external hard drive, partitioned into three, one for the operating system, another for time machine and the other for Adobe Photoshop.

I do need more ram, I'm only running on 1 gig ram, love to have two more.

AMD, Pentium, all a preference/opinion, both do a really good job. Just go as big as you can, "More Power"   

That's not really any faster than keeping it on one partition.  The heads still have to move back and forth between the partitions and the bus can only move so much data.  On the up side it's easier that way to reformat the scratch partition to keep it from getting fragmented.  

And what follows is what I've gathered from reading on the topic. It may be wildly inaccurate, but it matches what I've read.

An external drive is a poor choice for a scratch disk unless it's eSATA.  USB drives are slower than internal ATA and use more CPU cycles to move data.  I would imagine firewire sits somewhere in between, but I can't seem to find much that compares all 3.

edit... - Looks like Bob beat me to it.

I've got Vista on my notebook and XP on my desktop (and Ubuntu on my file server ).  I turned off most of the fancy eye candy type stuff and it seems to run ok.  I'm sure there are some technical reasons why people don't like it, but I think a lot of it's hype too.  To me it's just an operating system.