[Fyron]

I'm not talking about an old motherboard supporting brand new CPUs, but rather what is now a fancy quad core supported by your mobo becoming a bargain-basement priced part in a few years time. Have little doubt that in 3-4 years, the mid-high end CPUs won't work in whatever motherboard you get today. Of course, if you have a huge budget to blow through, a quad core CPU won't necessarily hurt much. It just tends to come with a rather large jump in price... I'd rather spend that money on more RAM or more HDD, personally.

200 MHz CPUs cannot be clocked to GHz frequencies without some massive liquid nitrogen based cooling and a heaping spoonful of luck... Sane over-clocking might net 10, 20% more clock frequency (depending on CPU and mobo chipset). Going much over that tends to cause rampant instability.

Make sure to buy your system with gigabyte sticks of RAM. Nothing is worse than getting 2 GB, and later finding out it was really 4 x 512 MB sticks so you can't expand cleanly... If you are going to stick with XP, 2 GB is more than sufficient. If you want to go with Vista, 2 GB is probably still sufficient. It couldn't hurt to slap in another GB either way, though. Make sure they are giving you a competitive price with purchasing RAM separately though (particularly from a good, cheap online vendor), and not gouging you for extra profit margin. RAM is one of the easiest things to install into a computer.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray are not worth investing in at this juncture. The quality improvements over DVD in an up-converting player are marginal at best (even with a nice HDTV), for a massive price premium. Best to wait until they hit price levels equivalent to today's DVD, in either a combo player or just one format, with the other going the way of Betamax.