Anything you buy will be ADEQUATE. I have one machine running AC that is a celeron 500 MHz (hey, I moved finally put down the pentium 400). Most of my machines are 2.4 GHz Pentium 4s with 80 G hard drives, running XP. They move fairly quickly although occasionally there will be a 3-8 second pause first thing in the morning.
I would totally agree with Bert, the main computer should be dedicated to just AC. If you are starting new go with Win 7 pro. You can use home on a peer to peer system but pro will be more upgradeable. If the other machines are XP, there may be some issues with networking.
Get at least 4Gig for the main computer, a large hard drive (500 to 1 Terabite), A quad core would be good and the AMD ones are not very expensive. The other computers almost won't matter, almost everything has 2-4 G and a 300-500 G hard drive with a dual core. I would strive for Gigabit networking since it made more of a difference than anything when I last upgraded my system a couple years ago. Since you are going to be using one machine for Dragon and your "main consulting computer" it probably should mirror the specs for the "main AC computer."
Research the board about backup stratagies and hardware associated. Backing up is key to a good system.
These are nothing fancy, and probably well under 2K for 4 computers, potentially a lot less.
Last edited by DoctorWAW; 09/28/2010 2:18 PM.
