CPU and OS questions?

You are right about the 8 gigs of memory, besides it is over kill. You would probably never use 8 gigs of ram regardless of which os you use. As far as the cpu goes, you would never be able to tell the speed difference in the 2 unless you benchmark them. Stick with xp and read up on windows 7. You might be able to skip vista all together. Won't that be nice!