I agree with tony_scarpelli, although at your income, or lack thereof, this might take a while. Always a good idea to build a foundation-system. Here is the deal: on my Samsung 60gb/5400rpm HDD the "average read-seek time" is 8.9ms. "ms" stands for milliseconds as we all know. I believe on a 7200rpm drive it is around 7ms or maybe 6ms. Well, average latency is 5.56ms... my point is, at these speeds, only accessing large files will drag response time. Anyways, I did earlier recommend the cheapest on your list, which happens to have been the 40gb/7200rpm. And like Tony said, why not go even smaller, i.e. 20gb/7200rpm and put the savings toward a MONSTER GeForce3Ti500 when, thanx to the "release" of the GF4's, the price should drop a notch (that is what I'm hoping so I can retire my GeForce2Pro64mb, although I'm not sure if that is a smart thing since the GF2Pro is still a pretty good card, unfortunately my new game IL-2 is choking at 35fps just flying around... that game is quite the needy-*****).