[Tulac]

ATI Radeon HD4850 is the best buy for graphics ATM, you can buy a dual core AMD like the one Icewolf told and then upgrade later on to quad, but if you choose an intel quad like q66000 you won't be able to upgrade because Intel changed it's platform on the new i7 processors which are expensive as hell. I'm not sure if you should go for quad just yet, there are only a handful of games that can use it and only one where it will have a bigger impact on FPS (GTA4). If you use your PC for recoding your media etc. then go for a quad core.

Also people who are talking about single cores, you can't even buy them anymore. It's like saying don't buy MMX processors it won't give you an advantage in DOS. Besides using only one core in DOSBox or older windows games is more than enough and is at least as fast as the last generation of single core processors. Just because older games didn't use multicores doesn't mean they won't work on them.

And not to mention that you probably won't even be able to run future games on a singe core processor (GTA4 being the first to break that milestone I think). I probably don't have too mention that dual core processors are very cheap nowadays so that it wouldn't make any sense to buy a single core any way.

On the issue of Vista, you can always use dual boot XP or virtual PC for backwards compatibility as far as I can see.