Nvidia has some awesome graphic cards, if you've ever played or hear of delta force, they design their games with them. also alienware makes some awesome graphic cards. I use jasc for foto manipulation and macromedia studio mx plus for all my other design needs. macstudmx+ comes with flash and dreameaver which I find very useful most of the times(yet I code with notepad hehe) and contribute is like the ultimate lazy person software. I also use seagull ftp to upload files to my server, it's free, I recomend it, though sometimes you loose all your config files, just restart and it makes it better. also a lot of memory is helpful(obviously). Either way hope this helps. If you want the cheapest prices on hardware use
http://www.pricewatch.com/ they usually are the cheapest.
ok so let me ring this up real quick,
ok so macstud2004 is 899
the graphic card is (geforce 4) 91
and memory is about 50
jasc is 70 or 80
total I spent on system, 1120 american dollars. Yep. Add tax to that (i use 5% as a basic default) and the total comes out to be 1176 for n awesome hardcore graphic, web developer computer. So yea you'll need more than a grande if you want the goodies. but if you are happy with notepad and don't know flash skip out on the macstud and get yourself a kickin monitor. Hope this helps.
